Christianity in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

BreakPoint WorldView » March 2009

In an early scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious, FBI agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) and special recruit Alicia Hubermann (Ingrid Bergman)—the “notorious” playgirl from whom the film takes its title—are flying to Rio de Janeiro on a secret mission. During the flight, Devlin has to inform Alicia that her father, a Nazi who had been convicted of war crimes, has killed himself in his prison cell.

“I don’t know why I should feel so bad,” Alicia muses aloud. “When he told me a few years ago what he was, everything went to pot. I didn’t care what happened to me. But now I remember how nice he once was. How nice we both were. Very nice. It’s a very curious feeling, as if something had happened to me and not to him. You see, I don’t have to hate him anymore—or myself.”

Devlin interrupts to tell her that they’re coming into Rio. There follows a famous shot in which Alicia leans past him to look out his window, unwittingly getting the reserved man’s attention for the first time and sparking what will become a stormy but passionate romance. But there’s another quick shot just before that, in which Alicia glances to the other side, out her own window, and spies a statue on a mountaintop: the famous statue “Christ the Redeemer” that stands with arms outstretched, overlooking the city of Rio.

From this point on, the film focuses on Alicia’s struggle to change, to become again the “very nice” person she used to be, and her eventual redemption through suffering.

Given these themes, is the visual reference to Christ a coincidence? In a Hitchcock film, not likely. Hitchcock didn’t typically deal in coincidences. His films are rich with layers of allusion and meaning, some mischievous, others more serious.

Many of the great iconic moments in those films—the Christ statue in Notorious; a nun whose ominous appearance triggers the final tragedy in Vertigo; another statue, this one of Christ carrying His cross, that overshadows the tormented priest walking through the streets in I Confess—involve religious figures or symbols. But iconic images in themselves, powerful and memorable as they may be, are ultimately limited in scope. By themselves they can’t carry a film or signal its deepest meanings, especially with a director known for mixing irreverence with seriousness and playfulness with gravity.

To understand these meanings in Hitchcock’s films, we have to dig deeper, to look at how plots, dialogue, characters, and symbolism combine to convey a worldview that, despite its frequent bleakness, strongly emphasizes the presence of justice and order in what may look on the surface like an unjust, chaotic world.

FEAR, REALISM, AND REASON
In his book Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, Patrick McGilligan writes of the director:

His formal education was bound up with religion. . . . Catholicism swirled around Hitchcock’s boyhood the way London fog envelops [his 1927 film] The Lodger. He was inclined to say religion never had much effect on him, even though he remained a churchgoer and a steadfast Catholic throughout his life (priests were welcome visitors to his home as well as to his sets). But Catholicism pervades his films, albeit a brand of Catholicism spiked with irreverence and iconoclasm. It’s there in characters and settings, in the small details and larger arc of the stories, in the symbols and motifs. (17)

Hitchcock attended a strict Jesuit school from age eleven to almost fourteen. He later recalled that the school placed particular emphasis on fear, realism, and reason as key traits of religion. Whatever Hitchcock may have said about the role of religion in his life and work, that education remained a lifelong influence. As McGilligan writes: “The fear, the realism mixed with fancy, the reasoning power and discipline of ordered thinking—these were the cornerstones of his art” (McGilligan 24). Not only that, but they helped shape his view of the world.

The mind behind Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work is preoccupied, even obsessed, with questions of goodness and evil, innocence and guilt. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who worked with Hitchcock on the 1948 film Rope, observed that it was “obvious to anyone worked with him that he had a strong sense of sin” (quoted by David Sterritt in the essay “The Destruction that Wasteth at Noonday: Hitchcock’s Atheology”). Rope itself is an excellent example of this, with its tale of two young men who are inspired to commit murder by their former housemaster’s Nietzschean philosophies about superior beings and their right to act as they please.

Like Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, Hitchcock here tells the story of murder for the sake of an idea—and also like Dostoevsky, he takes a traditionalist Christian perspective against the idea, going beyond condemning the crime to challenging the theory that inspired it. Though religion is never formally appealed to, the final condemnation of the murder in Rope is deeply rooted in Christian ideas about the sanctity of human life. Ironically, this condemnation comes from a character who makes no pretense of being a Christian, and who in fact is responsible for planting the idea that led to the crime.

The killers in Rope, Brandon and Philip (John Dall and Farley Granger), are portrayed as repulsive characters, especially Brandon, who appears not to have a shred of conscience. They even hold a macabre dinner party for friends and relatives of the murdered man, using the chest holding his corpse as a buffet table. And when Brandon finally reveals the truth about the killing to Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), the man who taught him his theories about “the intellectually superior” and their special rights and privileges, Rupert recoils in horror from the evidence of what those theories really mean when played out in real life:

Brandon, Brandon, until this very moment, this world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I’ve tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect. And you’ve thrown my own words right back in my face, Brandon. You were right to; if nothing else, a man should stand by his words. But you’ve given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of, and you’ve tried to twist them into a cold, logical excuse for your ugly murder! Well, they never were that, Brandon. And you can’t make them that. There must have been something deep inside you from the very start that let you do this thing, but there’s always been something deep inside me that would never let me do it, and would never let me be a party to it now. . . . Tonight you’ve made me ashamed of every concept I ever had of superior or inferior beings. But I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we are each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society we live in. By what right do you dare say that there’s a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you dare decide that that boy in there was inferior and therefore could be killed? Did you think you were God, Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave? Well, I don’t know what you thought or what you are, but I know what you’ve done. You’ve murdered! You’ve strangled the life out of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could, and never will again.

Promising Brandon and Philip that they’re both “going to die” for what they’ve done, Rupert fires a gun out the window to alert the police. Through all his moral contortions, as he moves toward taking responsibility and then backs away again, Rupert has managed to hold on to the one essential fact that the crime has shown him: that all his theories about the relative value of different human lives were wrong.

Dr. Ken Boa has said of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that it shows the writer’s familiarity with and distrust of such ultimately barren philosophies as nihilism and utilitarianism (“Crime and Punishment,” Great Books Audio Series). Hitchcock, for his part, could be accused of flirting with nihilism—the darkness of many of his films plus the unhappy endings of several might seem to support such a charge—but under scrutiny, the accusation falls apart. As with Dostoevsky, Hitchcock’s grasp of spiritual truth kept him from embracing meaninglessness and despair.

DIVINE JUSTICE
That spiritual truth—the sense of “right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe,” as C. S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity—over and over again manifests itself in Hitchcock’s films as an implacable sense of justice. Consider the nun who appears in the church bell tower at the end of Vertigo, just after the character Judy (Kim Novak) has confessed to the man she loves, Scottie (James Stewart), her involvement in a murder and the subsequent cover-up. Though she pleads with him to keep her “safe,” he repeats, “It’s too late. It’s too late.” Then the nun appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and startles Judy so badly that she falls to her death. The apparent randomness of the film’s final moments actually fulfills the director’s vision of divine justice: that Judy and Scottie cannot be happy together after what she has done, and that her guilt must be atoned for.

This vision plays out in film after film, in a myriad of ways. Sometimes the agent of justice is human, sometimes a mere “accident.” In at least one well-known case, it is animals. Peter T. Chattaway wrote in Christianity Today (July 25, 2006), “On one level, The Birds raises the question of why God permits evil, but on another, it also suggests that there is something dreadfully awe-inspiring in the sometimes violent, sometimes eerily calm birds. [Critic Richard A.] Blake does not say the birds represent God, per se, but he does note that they are ‘totally Other’ and ‘totally incomprehensible to the human mind,’ and neither reason nor superstition can explain them away.”

On the whole, Hitchcock appears to be more comfortable with portrayals of God’s wrath against human folly, whether it be mere “complacency” or something worse, than any of His softer qualities. Sometimes divine rescue occurs at the last moment, as when the falsely accused Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) prays for help in The Wrong Man, and then is exonerated when the true criminal commits another crime. But in films where tortured characters are searching for hope, comfort, and understanding, such as Spellbound and Marnie, Hitchcock often turns to psychology, which served many in the twentieth century as a god of sorts.

For instance, in Marnie, the title character (Tippi Hedren) is a kleptomaniac who loathes men, including her husband, Mark (Sean Connery), but her problems are resolved and she gets a second chance at life when Mark and her mother help her remember terrible childhood memories that she had suppressed. At last she knows why she has a compulsion to steal. “When a child, a child of any age, Marnie, can’t get love,” Mark tells her, “it takes what it can get, any way it can get it. It’s not so hard to understand.”

But even psychology, Hitchcock seems to concede, cannot do everything. At the end of Psycho, even after we’ve been given a rational explanation of the psychosis of the murderous Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) by a psychiatrist, Norman still is not cured, and it is debatable whether he ever will be. We’re left with a haunting image of his insane grin as he sits alone in his cell, the voice and personality of his dead mother having taken over his mind completely. Hitchcock may see a prominent role for psychology—sometimes an appropriate role, sometimes perhaps a little too prominent—but he manages to keep from crossing the line into a utopian view of a purely human solution to the problem of pain.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT
But his fixation with that problem and its causes has led some to suggest that in the end, his belief in God failed to hold up. His 1972 film Frenzy, the next to last film that he made, is sometimes cited as proof of this theory. In one chilling scene, the character Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) screams to Jesus to help her as she is being raped and murdered—but no one comes to help. The later murder of a barmaid named Babs (Anna Massey), though not shown onscreen, is just as chilling in its own way, as the camera pans away from the helpless woman, demonstrating her utter aloneness and vulnerability.

Frenzy is a far cry from earlier films like The Wrong Man or I Confess, in which help comes just in the nick of time. As Sterritt writes, hindsight appears to show us that “Manny Balestrero’s prayer in The Wrong Man, immediately followed by the revelation and apprehension of the ‘right’ man, is easily taken as a sign of Hitchcock’s willingness to accept the idea of a caring, protective God, at least hypothetically or provisionally. As we’ve seen, however, the contiguity of these events doesn’t affirm a cause-and-effect relationship between them, and the stranger who’s arrested might possibly be another wrong man, the next victim in a cosmic practical joke—offscreen and onscreen, Hitchcock loved practical jokes—perpetrated by the mischievous-malevolent forces of accident, contingency, and chance.”

Though justice finally arrives in Frenzy—in typical subversive Hitchcock fashion, it arrives in the form of a primly old-fashioned police inspector who has spent much of the film providing comic relief—it cannot quite wash away the taste of horror left by the brutal earlier scenes. As Sterritt describes them:

The murders in Frenzy, like those in Psycho, are organized in a binary structure: Number One is abrupt and explicit, while Number Two replaces graphic representation with muted reference to the earlier scene, knowing the viewer’s sense memory will fill in the horrendous blanks. The first homicide is the on-screen rape and murder of Brenda Blaney, the entrepreneur of a “marriage and friendship” service; the second is the offscreen rape and murder of Babs Milligan, enacted behind closed doors while the camera retreats downstairs and into a bustling street, indicating that no power or person, including God and the film’s godlike director, will intercede on the hapless victim’s behalf. As disturbing as Babs’s killing is, however, the violation and murder of Brenda is the moment in Frenzy, and in Hitchcock’s entire oeuvre, that most vividly suggests the tension in his mind between a lingering desire for the consolations of traditional religious belief and an intellectual awareness that the world contains unambiguous evils much too prevalent and powerful to be ameliorated, regulated, or even dissimulated by the claims of conventional faith.

And yet, justice does come. It is difficult to think of a Hitchcock film in which justice does not come at last. In the brutality of Frenzy, the random chaos of The Birds, the agony of Scottie’s loss in Vertigo—in all these stories of destruction and pain, there is still a sense of wrongs being righted by an invisible but powerful hand. In the midst of turmoil, whether it be the mayhem of a film like Psycho or simply the painful inner turmoil of a character like Alicia in Notorious, there is an invisible someone who represents righteousness and goodness. The God’s-eye view Sterritt refers to may seem too high and far away to care, but it is there, and it will not be discounted.

At the end of his biography, Patrick McGilligan writes: “No matter how much Alfred Joseph Hitchcock streaked his films with comedy and entertainment, they portrayed a world tilting toward madness and horror” (746). Hitchcock was too honest to pretend that the existence of God automatically made the problem of evil go away, in fiction or in life. The fear, realism, and reason he referred to as being part of his Jesuit education were inextricably bound up with his view of faith, and dominated his mindset and his artistry.

But if his picture of God is a rather distant and formal one, it is nonetheless still the picture of a God who is real and active, who personifies goodness and justice, and who will restore order and punish evil in the end. If that presence does not fully banish the madness and horror, it restrains them enough to make the world bearable, and sheds enough light to keep it from plunging fully into darkness.

Gina R. Dalfonzo is editor of The Point and Dickensblog and a writer for BreakPoint Radio.