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Monthly Review (2011) - Alfred Hitchcock Presents Class Struggle

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Abstract

What they focus on is the sort of thing that academics have a penchant for, often psychoanalysis, with its ever-complicating webwork of infant sexuality, Oedipal rages, anal sadism, castration anxiety, the "family romance" (a misnomer if ever there was one), phallic mothers and penis babies, and other exciting esoterica. Hitchcock goes out of his way to feature worksites, from the assembly line in the factory of Secret Agent to the greengrocer wholesale market in Frenzy to the inside of a cab (with its frustrated worker-driver) in his very last movie, Family Plot. Part of the appeal of this film-maker with a mass authence surely has to do with what are really mass issues, with the fact that he depicted struggles that resonated with the actual lives of viewers, even if in an unconscious or displaced form.