With the new series Bates Motel airing on A&E this spring, Hitchcock's seminal film Psycho is re-emerging in popular culture. The show follows a young Norman Bates and his mother in a 'contemporary prequel' to the horrific Psycho story. David Greven's Psycho-Sexual charts canonical Hitchcock films as precursors to 1970s New Hollywood films like Dressed to Kill (De Palma), Cruising (Friedkin) and Taxi Driver (Scorsese). Get your DVD players ready, because David Greven gives us some 'must see' viewing and insightful commentary to accompany his new book.
'The Essential Cold War Hitchcock'
by David Greven
Alfred Hitchcock directed, according to IMDB, 67 titles (including episodes for his anthology TV series). Narrowing down a list of the “essential” Hitchcock is an impossible task given how substantive the director’s body of work remains. So, here is a list of films that are particularly germane to the questions I raise in my book Psycho-Sexual. My thesis in this book is that Hitchcock’s films from the Cold War era onward thematize an emergent form of American masculinity that will prove to be crucial to several directors of the 1970s (in a period usually called the New Hollywood) and beyond. This Hitchcockian masculinity is defined by a tendency toward voyeurism, a push-pull attraction to the homoerotic, and an attitude toward sexuality that can be best described as pornographic. The current fascinations with surveillance in our culture—the spycam-sensibility of the present, the fears over identity theft—have their roots in the Cold War paranoia Hitchcock depicted.
Rope (1948). Two young men, lovers who share a swanky New York City apartment, kill one of their friends and stuff his body into a long, rectangular chest. They then host a dinner party, serving food on the chest with the dead body in it; the guests include the dead man’s father and the killers' former headmaster, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Hitchcock’s film is an acute analysis of homophobia, masculinity, women’s ambiguous relationship to gay subculture, fascist ideology, and the director’s own career-long fascination with food-sex-death imagery.
Strangers on a Train (1951) and I Confess (1953). This pair of films thematizes the “open secret” of homosexuality, simultaneously unspeakable and nearly explicit. In Strangers, Bruno Anthony’s desire to kill for Guy Haines, and to have Guy kill his father, emerges as an allegory for homosexual courtship. In I Confess, the priest (Montgomery Clift) bound by the secrecy of the Catholic confessional, is hounded by the murderer, who confesses to the priest but then proceeds to hound him for his own crime. In a culture that increasingly viewed relationships between men as suspect, these two films show a culture of repression at its breaking point.
'The Essential Cold War Hitchcock'
by David Greven
Alfred Hitchcock directed, according to IMDB, 67 titles (including episodes for his anthology TV series). Narrowing down a list of the “essential” Hitchcock is an impossible task given how substantive the director’s body of work remains. So, here is a list of films that are particularly germane to the questions I raise in my book Psycho-Sexual. My thesis in this book is that Hitchcock’s films from the Cold War era onward thematize an emergent form of American masculinity that will prove to be crucial to several directors of the 1970s (in a period usually called the New Hollywood) and beyond. This Hitchcockian masculinity is defined by a tendency toward voyeurism, a push-pull attraction to the homoerotic, and an attitude toward sexuality that can be best described as pornographic. The current fascinations with surveillance in our culture—the spycam-sensibility of the present, the fears over identity theft—have their roots in the Cold War paranoia Hitchcock depicted.
Rope (1948). Two young men, lovers who share a swanky New York City apartment, kill one of their friends and stuff his body into a long, rectangular chest. They then host a dinner party, serving food on the chest with the dead body in it; the guests include the dead man’s father and the killers' former headmaster, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Hitchcock’s film is an acute analysis of homophobia, masculinity, women’s ambiguous relationship to gay subculture, fascist ideology, and the director’s own career-long fascination with food-sex-death imagery.
Strangers on a Train (1951) and I Confess (1953). This pair of films thematizes the “open secret” of homosexuality, simultaneously unspeakable and nearly explicit. In Strangers, Bruno Anthony’s desire to kill for Guy Haines, and to have Guy kill his father, emerges as an allegory for homosexual courtship. In I Confess, the priest (Montgomery Clift) bound by the secrecy of the Catholic confessional, is hounded by the murderer, who confesses to the priest but then proceeds to hound him for his own crime. In a culture that increasingly viewed relationships between men as suspect, these two films show a culture of repression at its breaking point.
