Response 4: Shadow of a Doubt

“I figured there must have been a human being in there”: Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt

            What is easily read as sexual tension in Shadow of a Doubt may indeed be erotically charged. It may also be a frustrated maneuvering between the self and other—which the sexual often is—of two who interact and never converge. Mark Seltzer mentions this separation and pain in his “The Serial Killer as a Type of Person,” this intense hunger to know the self and its secrets as they appear external to the known body. Young Charlie’s exploration begins like a game, while Uncle Charlie’s seeking almost seems to wound him. His fascination with the proverbial reflection in the pool is coupled with the urge to destroy it—that is to say, he’s met this figure in young Charlie that so well mirrors his own, that may be as smart as he is, but it (she) has some motivation that is foreign to him. So, in response to that uncanny reflection, he can possess, or he can destroy.

            While we could have a psychoanalytic field day with some of the lines/themes in this film (destroying being one of them, taken in a sexual context; Charles’ aggressive deliveries of “give it to me,” and “you can see me get off [the train],” taken tongue-in-cheek; even the scene after being met at the train when Charles trails behind, watching young Charlie walk ahead of him, pulling out a cigar, making sure his luggage “isn’t too heavy for [her]”), there is something darker here than carnal tension. Most of the scenes between the two are slower, quieter, more secret. Plenty are spent behind closed doors. There is something much more compelling in watching these two dance around each other in hidden spaces, often in mental spaces, something more mysterious in trying to know another person when “no one knows what goes on inside when the doors are locked.”

            This interiority, the lack of which is discussed in Seltzer’s piece, is somehow vacant in the killer (99). Against our better judgement, and all his protections, then, Uncle Charlie is hiding—very literally—nothing. That void is yet stirred by the young Charlie, acting as a “foreign body perturbing the balance” of Uncle Charlie’s persona. Her sudden meddling presence in his carefully designed life might act as a quieter version of the capital-v Voice that disturbs his makeshift structure of a subject (102). Her view of him from the outside (as well as the filming techniques that might allow us in) proves the power of concealment. We’re hard-pressed to go beyond the image and into it, particularly if we are told there is nothing “in there” to find.

            At points when he is nearing some kind of truth, or even admission, Charles is filmed in profile—a partial-view of a hollow subject. A key scene (almost painfully symbolic—never minding doors and locks and keys) situates young Charlie and her older counterpart on the back stairwell: her illuminated beneath a lamp, and he in complete shadow, where his face is altogether indiscernible. A similar scene, even more notable for its style, is an extreme close-up during Charles’ monologue about useless women, in which, again, we can only one side of his face. Young Charlie (now faceless herself) is heard offscreen inviting sympathy for these women who are alive, who are human beings, and we witness a slow mechanical turn of Charles’ head to face us, in the very moment he questions, “Are they?”

            Uncle Charlie knows how to pattern himself. He likes people who “face facts.” He has had that “traumatic replacement of perception by representation,” and can’t intuit an alternative to his code of knowing (Seltzer 104). Add to this a cast of pedantic people who surround young Charlie (like Ann, the ever-questioning younger sister; her father, the ever-conniving murderer-in-the-making), and Charlie appears almost alone in her creative intuition, making her natural prey. Charles bashes his sister for not having “better sense,” but he doesn’t seem to encourage this quality in women either, despite constantly disparaging them for not having it. He tries to discourage Charlie by mocking her as the “clever little girl that knows something,” telling her first that “it isn’t good to find things out,” and later that she ought to “use [her] wits, learn something.”

            The confusion continues as Charles’ relationship with his niece becomes more physical and more threatening. Earlier on in the film he leads he by the elbow, takes her by the wrists, every touch more violent as time goes on. At one point we see him with a hand around her neck—both an erotic zone and a locus of control—calling Charlie the “thing I love most in the world.” When pressed for meaning, this passing phrase contradicts his hatred for materialism and makes us question his capacity for and definition of love. Young Charlie’s gradual transformation from adored niece to complication turns immediate here: she isn’t the person he loves most, and that makes her more easily destroyed.

            Of course we know that Uncle Charlie is in fact destroyed in the end, but we are left with a reflection of him whose eyes we cannot meet. While Charles is praised during the funeral, young Charlie and Jack stand outside the church and vow to keep each other’s secrets. They are quiet, detached, and contemplative, often looking off into space or at the ground. In this scene, young Charlie becomes the one who is hidden from us, we are on the outside again. Now we can only study her face, wondering what might be inside her head, whether there is a human being left in there anymore.

“phallus-bird-fetish-mother-eye-knife-camera”

What we talk about when we talk about Psycho?

Dichotomies in Black and White

While watching this film, I did not really know what to make of it.  There’s elements of dark humor, there’s artistic cinematography, the interactions and dialogue between characters comes off as bizarre, and at times it has the atmosphere of a silent film (exaggerated gestures, facial expressions, and long lasting close-ups of characters just staring and not talking), while the sound aspects are part melodrama and part musical.  Williams describes Night of the Hunter as being surreal, a fable, noir, a monster movie, a musical, social commentary on the Great Depression, a comedy, a melodrama, and a Christmas film (30).

One thing that really appealed to me about this film was the framing of shots and the mise en scene.  There were many beautiful shots throughout the film, such as the children going down the river and when Willa is at the bottom of the lake in the car and her hair can be compared to the surrounding seaweed.  As Williams states, “background details […] always threaten to burst to the fore” (30).  Shots are framed in such a way that small details become the largest part of the picture with action occurring in the background, like when the children are going down the river and the camera focuses on the bunnies on the shore or the cobweb above them.

Another aspect that contributes to the visual style of Night of the Hunter is various forms of doubles and dichotomies, whether through symmetry, reflections, shadows, or ideologies.  During the scene where the children arrive at their destination after going down the river, they come upon a house and barn, similar in size, which frame the shot.   The shoreline and water take up half of the horizontal space, reflecting the two buildings, which portrays symmetry on all sides in the shot.  This represents a possibility of stability for the children, away from the deep, menacing shadows and sharp, Expressionist angles that accompany Powell.  As for shadows, they are used very effectively throughout the film, either being softer, causing the viewers to focus their attention on specific characters, or sharper and reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and German Expressionism in general.  The lighting and shadows are given depth and character through the angles and lines they create within the mise en scene.  I say that the shadows were like a character themselves because not only are they prominent throughout the film, but because sometimes it seems like they are lying to us.  For example, one of the first interactions that the children have with Powell begins with them initially seeing the dark and defined shadow of Powell and his hat being reflected on the bedroom wall.  When they look out the window and the viewer joins them in their view of Powell, we are looking down on him in the street standing well below the source of light that is supposedly casting a heavily defined shadow on the second floor.  This not only portrays his looming presence and power, but makes the viewer question the reality of light and shadows, along with good and evil, right and wrong, hate and love.  Are the dichotomies and dominant ideologies presented in the film to be trusted at face value?  This doubling is also shown through reflections, with the prominent example being the scene on Willa and Powell’s wedding night after he rejects her sexually under the guise of religion.  She is in a nightgown/lingerie and looks at herself as Powell preaches that women are solely meant for children and not anything lustful.  She expresses a desire to “be what Harry wants [her] to be” and almost becomes zombie like in her devotion and dismissal of her autonomy.  Willa receives a large amount of pressure from those around her to be with a man, with this misogynistic beliefs stemming from a society that heavily criticized women who were single, working mothers.

The surrealism of the dialogue, plot, and overall atmosphere of Night of the Hunter demonstrates how bizarre it is to think of complex social issues as strictly black and white.  The sharp angles and contrast between shadows and light add to the idea that ideas presented as ideologically black and white aren’t that simple, and may only be considered ‘right’ because of what has been presented within hegemonic social structures that doesn’t simply reveal what’s underneath and the actual truth.

Response #4

Examining the Style and Elements of The Night of the Hunter

 I feel that a film such as The Night of the Hunter (1955) is nearly individual in its ability to defy the expectations of a first-time viewer both in structure and presentation. The unexpected ways in which the plot unfolds for the watcher is almost akin to the children's trip down the river where they have no possible way of knowing what will happen next. This unexpectedness isn't just constrained to plot details; however, but can also be found in the multiple styles of the film itself which change from genre to genre.

     

The film stays mostly in the thriller genre but often blends in others such as almost out of place slapstick comedy scenes like when the children are trying to escape from Powell in the basement and they manage to drop a shelf full of bottles on his head, resulting in an oddly comedic groan from the preacher. Less intrusive I think is the sudden Christmas scene at the ending of the movie which even though it comes out of left field, I believe it has its place owing to certain interpretations that connect Preacher Powell with the Old Testament and Rachel Cooper with the New Testament. In the Christian New Testament, other than Easter, Christmas is the most notable holiday so I think it's only fitting that the triumph of Cooper over Powell (N.T. over O.T.) is celebrated by a holiday that is only present in the N.T. Also, considering that Christmas is the time when Jesus was born, maybe the film is positing an analogy of Jesus' birth with the birth of a new life for the children with Ms. Cooper?

      

Another genre that is somewhat strangely included is the musical; singing plays a prominent role in the film with some interludes of song happening every once in a while for a couple minutes at a time. The most notable of these being Powell's reoccurring “Leaning” song and Pearl's song when she and her brother have first escaped out into the river. Powell's song is clearly being played for irony seeing as he definitely does not intend to leave the children “safe and secure from all alarms” as he proclaims in the hymn. This incongruity between the lyrics of the song and his true intentions only add to two-facedness of the preacher's character. On the other hand, Pearl's song reveals nothing about her sorta bland character, but is really more of a mood-setter that contributes to the odd dreamy atmosphere that can be traced at certain parts of the film.

 

There are other moments like this throughout the film that also create this sort of dreamlike sensation such as when we see Willa dead at the bottom of the lake, when the children are sleeping at the top of the barn, and when Powell is about to kill Willa. Some of the factors that can be found in each of these scenes that I think cause this atmosphere is the way that the camera is used and the stylized sets. Take the lake scene for example, the very fact that we are seeing underwater already adds a sort of slow-motion/dazed feeling which makes it feel as though it were out of a dream. Add to that the way that the camera seems to wordlessly linger in on Willa's dead body for an extended period of time along with the muffled and tottering music and it really seems to create that dreamy atmosphere in the scene.

Response #4 Laamanen and Night of the Hunter

Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter is, among other things, an exploration of anxieties surrounding women and gender in the 1950s, and the changing norms and expectations around them. I will look at a particular aspect of Carl Laamanen’s essay “Preaching in the Darkness” to examine the dichotomy of traditional/new woman as represented in the film, and how this argument is both substantive and flawed using the example of how Willa’s dead body is framed in the submerged automobile.

                                       First, I want to look at Laamen’s argument that “by constructing Willa as the embodiment of the traditional fundamentalist woman, the film encourages us to read her death as the natural end of her complicity; for women to reverse the oppression of the patriarchal Church, the old, traditional image of the woman must die and be replaced by a new image of femininity” (14). However, Willa attempts to repudiate the imposition of a traditional family structure earlier in the film when she says that she does not want a husband, despite the pressures from Mrs. Spoon. Despite her reservations, she is vulnerable and lonely, and thus an easy target for the psychopathic Powell. To say that her death is the “natural end” for her complicity in her own oppression is simply inaccurate; although she does succumb to the pressures of patriarchal Christianity, as embodied by the Preacher, it begs the question of why Mrs. Spoon, who is far more invested in perpetuating this oppression, should not have been the one to die, or else why Willa would not have been characterized more similarly to her. Rather, Willa seems to me more representative of women who simply cannot escape from patriarchal Christian norms and values than a willing accomplice thereof.

                                       Going back to Carl Laamanen’s original argument, I want to pose this question: can the “old, traditional image of the woman” really “die and be replaced by a new image of femininity” when the image of Willa’s dead, submerged body is one of the most haunting and memorable scenes from the entire film? The camera starts on waving reeds on the bottom of river, like hair caught in a current, and slowly pans to the left, where Willa’s dead body is revealed in a white nightgown, her hair floating eerily in the current with the weeds. The deliberate movement of the camera, and the way it lingers on the movement of the water and Willa’s body, leave the viewer with the impression that the image of the traditional woman will haunt them for the rest of the film—an effect that Laughton achieves powerfully. It cannot fully override the image of the new woman, embodied in the figure of Miz Cooper, as it is this image that continues to haunt the viewer long after the film’s conclusion. The implication here is that the image of the traditional woman cannot fully die and simply be replaced by a newer, better version, contrary to Laamanen’s argument.

                                       In Night of the Hunter, Willa represents less the traditional woman in willing complicity with the patriarchy, but rather one who is trapped into its systems of oppression and domination. As such, her death is neither natural nor deserving; rather, through the camera’s framing of her and her death, the film leads the viewer to conclude that although some women manage to repudiate and resist, they will nonetheless be haunted by patriarchy’s omnipotence and its power to haunt the image of the new woman.

Being Inhuman

            Though tonight’s screening was my first time seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I was familiar with the general story and idea behind it. Despite never seeing/reading it before, the ideas behind the movie and book have always been of interest to me because of how it is involved in discussions of the 1950s and the move to the suburbs. I knew the film focused on a small suburban town and how the pods threaten—or in other interpretations, critique—this new suburban ideal of life. What struck me the most about the film though was not the discourse it had with suburbia, but the ways in which one is truly “human” and how it relates to emotions.

            The movie seems to suggest that emotions are what make one truly human, yet whenever people in the movie actually show emotions, they aren’t taken seriously. In the scene where Miles goes to visit Wilma and discuss her concerns for Uncle Ira, Wilma is the only character really showing emotion; she is upset and expresses feelings of unease, while everyone around her acts “cool”, or calm. When Miles later sees her, she no longer shows those emotions.

            Likewise, when Miles and Becky respond to a call made by Jack and Teddy to investigate a body they’ve found in the house, the people who show emotions are the ones who are taken less seriously. Teddy seems to express the most concern and panic in this scene, while Miles and Jack drink whiskey. It is especially noteworthy that the body is a double of Jack’s own, but Jack appears more casually curious than he does concerned.

            Later in the movie when the town has been taken over by pod people and Miles and Becky are the only two left to duplicate, it seems to be emphasized that emotion is what differentiates real humans from the new alien forms. More specifically, there is a focus on love. Miles and Becky insist that they are in love and they don’t want to be replaced, but the kind of emotion they seem to display toward each other aligns more closely with lust than love. This questions the distinction between love and lust, an idea that was raised in discussion.

            It is also interesting to note that the people showing the most emotion in the movie are women, like Wilma and Teddy. Instead of their emotions being taken seriously, the women are written off as needing to visit a “witch doctor”, while the cool, calm, collected men take charge. This is at odds with the movie’s message that love and emotion is what make people truly human. Yet the people who are showing the most emotion, and should therefore be considered the most human, are the ones who are treated almost sub-human at times.

            Though the film didn’t relate to suburbia as much as I had expected it to, the suburban setting of the town is useful in considering the film’s messages on the importance of emotion. During the post-WWII era when families were leaving the city in favor of the suburbs, it was usually a move that favored the well-being of the man in the family. The cool, calm men would leave their suburban homes to commute to the city for work, while their emotional wives were left in the house to tend to the home. With regards to the movie, one could interpret the suburbs as an environment that brings out the worst aspect of people, whether it’s a nature of detachment and nonchalance (exemplified by the men) or one of excess emotion and paranoia (exemplified by the women).

The Feminine Voice -- An Analysis of Willa, Ruby and Ms. Cooper

Charles Laughton’s The Night of The Hunter (1955)

I found the most prominent message in The Night of The Hunter to be the various portrayals of women and the feminine voice (or lack thereof) embodied by Willa, Ruby, and Ms. Cooper.

Willa is submissive to Harry the preacher by doing what she is told and prioritizing his views and decisions over her own.  She allows him to oppress her sexually and vocally without opposition.  Even though Willa has the desire to incorporate recreational sexual intercourse into their marriage, Harry brainwashes her into believing that a woman is unclean and sinful if she has a sexual desire outside of reproductive intentions.  All of Harry’s beliefs are rooted in religion and his hatred towards “impure” women and sex.  Therefore, Willa is representative as the female body that is passive and weak.

Similarly, Ruby is also instantly captivated by the preacher’s charming voice and his never-ending “words of wisdom”.  Ruby really has no individual goals or pursuits, but rather portrays the narrow-minded woman that only has her eyes set on one thing and believes she needs a man to make her happy.  She is clearly willing to give herself over to just about any man so she can be seen on his arm.  Ruby is the cliché exaggerated anti-feminist female character of the movie.

Is the audience supposed to resonate with Ruby to an extent?  Do we (and by we I speak particularly to the female audience) really hate Ruby because she represents everything that the feminist movement attempts to suppress, or do we hate the fact that she is a relatable (to an extent) figure?  Deep down, don’t we all wish to find that one person that can make us happy?  These are some things to consider although I don’t have the answers, but it could be important to dwell on before settling on obvious conclusions.

I want to talk about Ms. Cooper a little bit too, because she is the only female character in the film that stands for a different kind of feminine principle, one that symbolizes a motherly figure who is not sexualized or dumbed-down.  I think she is the only female figure who does not express overwhelming sexual attraction towards the preacher.  Ms. Cooper (and much of the end of the film) gives off a mother goose sense and feels very much like we are in a fairytale.  This makes for an interesting change of pace from the southern gothic genre experienced earlier in the film.

Ms. Cooper is the protective mother figure who takes in children under her wing.  She is loving (even if it was tough love), forgiving and comforting.  In fact, she is so adamant about protecting her younglings she even has a gun, and knows how to use it.  She isn’t married nor does she have children of her own (that we know of).  In fact, I would argue that Ms. Cooper is somewhat of a radical female figure for the 1950s.

The ritual aspect of confession says a lot about Ms. Cooper’s style of raising children, which I find fascinating, and something that Michel Foucault would have a lot to say about I’m sure.  Although rooted in religion, the idea of confession as a way to cleanliness and purity is something that remains very prominent in our culture.  However, technology has allowed the practice of confession to be reborn in very different forms such as through apps that allow anonymous confession like Yik Yak, etc.  It would be an interesting discussion to view the film as a religious parable (as we are easily invited) and consider how religious views remain present in today’s culture and how women fit into this conversation.