Sexism Overwhelms Skillful Construction

20. THE LADY VANISHES

CW: gaslighting, rape, abuse, misogyny

This is it, the Hitchcock ur-text I've been looking for. Everything good and bad about Hitchcock can be found here, and frankly the movie is something close to unreadable considering all the conflicting impulses. I'd call it incoherent but it's actually something more like ambi-coherent. It is equal parts territorializing and deterritorializing, rigorous and destabilizing, oppressive and sympathetic.

To begin: there is something the best Hitchcock movies do that connects with what my girlfriend and I call Female Horror. The best examples are MARNIE and THE BIRDS, although a case could be made for VERTIGO as well (despite its male POV). Hitchcock films are torture devices. They turn the screws in desperate people as they search for a way out of overpowering directorial control. It's not for nothing that some people, most notoriously Noah Berlatsky, have read Hitchcock's narrative engines as delivery systems for punishment. Yet because identification is never so simple, we are never just adopting the role of punisher (or punished) as viewers. We oscillate between roles, taking sadistic pleasure in the torment being meted out while also thrilling at our own helplessness.

It's for this reason that Hitchcock films cannot easily be condemned as misogynistic, though of course they often are. Misogyny is just one among many tools Hitchcock uses to produce his desired effects. There are certainly films which use misogyny for male pleasure, such as THE 39 STEPS. In that film, being handcuffed to a woman and slowly seducing her is a form of wish fulfillment for male viewers identifying with the male protagonist. It is not impossible for women to enjoy THE 39 STEPS, but to do so would involve ignoring or minimizing Madeleine Carroll's subjection to Hitchcockian control (this is the choice faced by men as well).

I'm not arguing that there's no place for women in Hitchcock, though I wouldn't blame anyone of any gender for finding all of this aversive. What's really challenging about Hitchcock is that his best films are *about* misogyny as much as they *are* misogynistic. I'm still a little reluctant to discuss MARNIE with total openness, but suffice to say that my own psyche fused with Tippi Hedren's in that film. Tippi Hedren suffers plenty of vileness at Hitchcock's hand in MARNIE, and of course we're all aware of the man's treatment of her offscreen. Yet MARNIE is as much a chronicle of the character Marnie's agonies as it is the generator of them. For me, watching it was one of the most profound experiences of excitement and terror that cinephilia has given me. In Hitchcock's film about women, his treatment of them is inseparable from the effect generated.

Now, is this proof of his genius? To make form and intention one in a total unity of artistic expression? Down that path lies the dismissal of female suffering, the instrumentalization of it for artistic truth. That is the path of praising Kubrick for THE SHINING's profound terrors while minimizing the real abuse of Shelley Duvall as our conduit for them. None of this is easy, and I absolutely want to leave it up to each viewer to judge the value of a film in which misogyny is inflicted on women for artistic effect. I would of course encourage men to think more critically about artistic production, as these well-known stories often get swept under the rug in defense of the sacrosanct "artistic process." But equally I am interested in interrogating whether (and if so, how) Hitchcock films can be pleasurable for women and people of various other gender identities.

In THE LADY VANISHES, Hitchcock's system of punishment is so flawless that it twice threatens to alter the ontology of his scenario. Margaret Lockwood, suffering from a head injury, becomes alerted to the lady's vanishment and asks around her train cabin where her companion has gone. Every single passenger gives her some variation of "there was never another lady with you" and/or "you're imagining things." We suspect this is some vast conspiracy, but it could in fact be true! We don't know the extent to which Hitchcock has manipulated us as viewers. It could be possible that there was never any lady at all, or that Margaret Lockwood hallucinated a remembered face onto an unrelated passenger. Hitchcock even goes so far as to visualize Lockwood's hallucinations, tricking us into the first person POV. When Lockwood then proclaims that she must have hallucinated, we also can't discern if the conspiracy is anything more than our shared delusion.

Hitchcock modulates this supreme destabilization by revealing first one lie, then another, to indicate that Lockwood's character is at least partially correct. As the audience, we take these cues to mean there is duplicity at hand, casting suspicion back on the conspirators. But until these lies are revealed, we are not sure if the Master of Suspense is pulling an even longer con on us. It's particularly devious that Hitchcock allows Lockwood to be partly right (there was in fact a lady) only to re-establish doubt right after (it could have been Madame Kummer, not Miss Froy). The structural tricks he uses to confirm our suspicions and then undermine them is some of the most skillful, deliberate filmmaking I've seen from him.

Hypothetically then, this could be a movie about the weaponization of misogyny to make women doubt even reality itself. It would be a movie about gaslighting in which we as much as the main character can't know anything for certain, a perceptual wooziness maintained for an hour or longer. That would be a terrifying route to take (and in some ways MARNIE takes up this existential fracturing two decades later, to predictably unnerving effect). But Hitchcock mostly wants to play with our expectations, and he's happy to side with Lockwood once he's had his fun. THE LADY VANISHES is never so surreal as in the moments after the titular act. It then transitions into a more familiar British murder mystery, of a piece with previous Hitchcock films of his European period.

And that would be quite alright if it weren't for Michael Redgrave, who enters the film in order to perform an upsetting routine of invasion and privacy violation. This is played for laughs by Hitchcock, a cheeky little battle of the sexes to oppose our romantic leads before their eventual union. But as often in Hitchcock, the light-hearted skit is off-key. Hitchcock has no awareness of what it feels like for women to tell men to leave a room and for men to flaunt their power by disobeying. It is not a struggle among equals but a rebellion by the oppressed to oust her oppressor. Again, remembering THE 39 STEPS, Hitchcock often likes to put women in humiliating situations of powerlessness to watch them squirm, only to pass these moments off as foreplay to a zesty sexual dynamism. Except it doesn't work in THE 39 STEPS, and it doesn't work here either. Redgrave is too domineering of a presence, though he disavows his monomania with humor. He acts as if he wields no control, yet he worms his way into Margaret Lockwood's life against her repeated protestations. Hitchcock's plot may ultimately take her side in the mystery, but it takes Redgrave's side in the romantic overtures. The film is divided between a struggle against conspiratorial menace and a movement toward romantic annexation.

Hitchcock usually takes one route or the other, often depending on the protagonist's gender. So it's bizarre that here Lockwood is both protagonist and object to be acted upon. It frustrates identification, as she is empowered and disempowered in turn. Hitchcock is an untrustworthy director in the extreme, but he has made several films which express a feminine terror in the face of unknowable power. THE LADY VANISHES feints at doing the same, only to reveal itself as another jovially chauvinistic trifle from Hitchcock's earlier years. I guess it says something about me that I prefer his deep dives into paranoia and dread over his earlier, funnier movies. But I can't help feeling those latter works compromise themselves by delighting in male power at the expense of their female leads. It bothers me increasingly, even as I know Hitchcock will later forsake these tendencies for something stranger and more disturbing. THE LADY VANISHES employs the whole database, bringing together matter and anti-matter to vaporize any intuitive response. It's mystifying, and I'm glad I found it, but I'm more aware than ever how the "bad" Hitchcock movies operate.

21. THE 39 STEPS

Big step up in terms of craft, and that's no knock on THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Those wide open Scottish vistas in particular give Hitchcock a lot of new maneuvering room. But it has a mean streak regarding women. Madeleine Carroll is a prop for a majority of the film. Only her charisma redeems the demeaning role.

Added to my Netflix Queue: 2/28/2008. Almost a decade.

22. THE RING

It'd be a mistake to lean too much on THE RING being Hitchcock's only original screenplay. While not averse to pitching in himself on later films, he seemed content to let others take the lion's share of that particular task. Evidently it was not where he felt his contributions were most fruitful. Perhaps delegating the screenplays to others more excited by them left Hitchcock freer to focus on visual expression. In that regard, THE RING is a verdict: images > plot.

Before auteur theory took a turn for the individualistic and self-aggrandizing, it was a way of finding ghosts in the film industry machine. One can see some sexism in Hitchcock's writing of the unfaithful love interest, but the woman problem is hardly unique to THE RING. If anything, his mature films are imbued with meaner and more pervasive misogyny. So this isn't the smoking gun that indicts Hitchcock as a woman-hater. A return to auteur theory's holistic framework exposes a more difficult truth: filmmaking is wholly amenable to its constituent misogynists. But the sexism of industrial film production is best thought of as a tendency. For every Hitchcock, you have a G.W. Pabst. Keeping in mind the exceptions (and, of course, the marginalized people gradually assuming the means of production) prevents fatalism about what films are capable of doing. We know that men use them to consolidate personal power. What might a filmmaking process that divests from power look like?

23. DOWNHILL

Oh cool, a film about a boy whose upper-crust status is tarnished (twice!) by petty, conniving, vindictive women. Like JAPANESE GIRLS AT THE HARBOR except, you know, reprehensible instead of heartbreaking.

To be fair, I'm sure at this point in his career Hitchcock was just filming whatever he was handed. However he seems to have had no success in salvaging such risible material. There are some clever subjective shots and nice foreground-background blocking strategies, but otherwise this is the most inessential Hitchcock film I've seen yet.

24. THE FARMER'S WIFE

This film centers on a man who, upon being rejected by the "undesirable" women he deigns to court, mocks them for their appearances, body sizes, and personality defects, even going so far as to induce a tearful nervous breakdown in one. After discussing his proposals among themselves, the women become jealous and reconsider the offer, only to discover that their suitor has inappropriately proposed to his long-time employee, thus sparing him the supreme indignity of settling for these second-rate substitutes.

In case you were wondering how misogynistic this film is (or how funny).

While watching THE FARMER'S WIFE, I speculated on how it was that Hitchcock transitioned into the suspense films he's best known for today. His early career apparently features quite a few melodramas, as well as broad comedies of this sort. How did he come to zero in on thrillers? Financial success surely played some part: because of Hitchock's adeptness at the thriller form, his thrillers must have been favorably received, therefore persuading the studios to continue hiring him for more of the same. Directors, like actors, can be typecast based on past success.

Yet on a deeper level, I wonder if Hitchcock and his financiers considered these other populist forms beneath him. Perhaps his technical precision was thought to be best suited for highly-structured, well-paced thrillers. Of course, in hindsight, it's easy to find proof for that proposition in Hitchcock's career. But comedies and melodramas require meticulous technique as well. All the best of them are as technically-accomplished as any well-made thriller. Preminger, for example, could not have achieved what he did in FOREVER AMBER if he weren't already such a consummate craftsman, as had been proved by LAURA and FALLEN ANGEL.

I think there's a gendered bias to what films are considered worthy of a skilled director. The masculinized thriller is likelier to attract acclaim among male audiences and film industry figures than an effective melodrama. If Hitchcock regularly excelled at making thrillers, and if those thrillers were beloved by audiences for their masculine virtues, my guess is that Hitchcock's career was shaped by such preferences. Hitchcock himself didn't seem to mind either, building a legend for himself out of the Master of Suspense label. (Somehow I doubt he would've settled for Master of Melodrama.)

While he began his career as an anonymous craftsman, promiscuously applying his talents to various genres, the intense specialization he would become known for is part of what made him an early auteur favorite. And I don't think it's a coincidence that many of those admirers were men, directors who would themselves be both denounced and celebrated for their masculinist tendencies (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer). Film history is not a neutral and impartial evolutionary process, but an ongoing effort in which men elevate other men to positions of influence. In taking the long view of Hitchcock's career, one can see just how deliberate a construction this really is.