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Literature Film Quarterly (1996) - Imps of the Perverse: Discovering the Poe/Hitchcock Connection

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Abstract

Charles Thomas Samuels, on the other hand, mentions similarities between the artists in order to point out what he considers Hitchcock's cinematic offenses: "Like Poe, the writer he most resembles, Hitchcock is obsessed by a small stock of situations which we can mistake for themes" (297).2 Even in Poe criticism, the connection has been made, though again undeveloped.

Article

In closing the "Introduction" to Hitchcock, his book of interviews with the "master of suspense," François Truffaut suggests that "Hitchcock belongs...among such artists of anxiety as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Poe" (15). While Truffaut notes a connection between Hitchcock and Poe, as have others, Truffaut fails to develop this somewhat obvious link between the two artists who, before the advent of Stephen King, were most identified in the public mind with horror and suspense. The purpose of this study is to present a preliminary exploration of the mostly overlooked and generally underestimated influence of Poe on Hitchcock. While not Hitchcock's only influence, Poe has contributed significant and unmistakable impulses to Hitchcock's work.[1] After examining similarities such as their common concern with audience response as a central aesthetic guide and their obsession with the irrational, I will demonstrate Poe's particular influence on what many consider Hitchcock's greatest masterpiece, Vertigo. This will lead finally to insights about Hitchcock's peculiar uses of Poe.

Perhaps because the French have long admired Poe, they were the first to see his influence on Hitchcock, another of their foreign culture heroes. In addition to Truffaut, Rohmer and Chabrol, for example, briefly note that in Strangers on a Train related imagery connects Bruno's Oedipal compulsions with Poe's fascination with Berenice's teeth. They also spot connections between the runaway carrousel in Strangers and Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (108-09). More recently, general thematic links are lightly touched on by Donald Spoto, who finds Hitchcock's theme of the dead's influence over the living reminiscent of Poe (Art 122), and Gabriel Miller, who sees Hitchcock's old houses, like those in Poe, as reflections of their inhabitants (36). Charles Thomas Samuels, on the other hand, mentions similarities between the artists in order to point out what he considers Hitchcock's cinematic offenses: "Like Poe, the writer he most resembles, Hitchcock is obsessed by a small stock of situations which we can mistake for themes" (297).[2] Even in Poe criticism, the connection has been made, though again undeveloped. Stephen Railton suggests that Hitchcock's brand of manipulative cinema descends "lineally" from Poe (138). While no single critic discovers a significant pattern of influence, taken together these insights convinci...

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Notes

  1. ↑ In addition to Kafka and Dostoyevsky, whom Truffaut notes as influences, Donald Spoto mentions Chesterton and Flaubert as forces in Hitchcock's artistic development (Dark Side 40-42).
  2. ↑ In addition to those mentioned, the following works make mention of Poe in connection with Hitchcock's work: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1992): 114; Tom Ryall's Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986): 120; Theodore Price's Hitchcock and Homosexuality (Metuchen. NJ: Scarecrow P. 1992): 239, 264; and David Sterritt's The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993): 107.
  3. ↑ In this connection it is interesting to realize that Hitchcock actually did make several movies that are variations of the Cinderella story, including Under Capricorn, Rebecca, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, and Marnie  — all about victimized females who must be rescued by a handsome prince figure.
  4. ↑ On another occasion, when being interviewed by Otis Ferguson in 1939, he reiterated his interest in the short story (which he later compared in format to films in the Truffaut interviews), hoping to create a format for short pieces like "the Poe thrillers, the horrific stories." He of course fulfills his ambition years later with Alfred Hitchcock Presents... series of television short stories with O. Henry's twists and Poe's horror (Spoto, Dark Side 182).
  5. ↑ See Thomas M Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991): 33. He describes how Hitchcock relates with his audience with "invitations to interactions."
  6. ↑ See Leitch's discussion of Scotty's fear of a relationship he cannot control and his inability to fall in love (197205).
  7. ↑ Interestingly, in the same discussion of the film, Hitchcock summarizes Scotty's desire to change Judy into the dead Madeleine: "To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who's dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia" (186). It is perhaps not unlikely that Hitchcock is recalling Poe's famous poem "Anabelle Lee," about a man who sleeps with his dead lover in her grave.
  8. ↑ Poe's sense of loss and its major influence on his work and his tortured life is the thesis of Kenneth Silverman's Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991 ).

Works Cited

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