Casting an adult eye on Hitchcock

Richard Scott Nokes at Unlocked Wordhoard responds to my quibble about Hitchcock with some excellent insights into Hitchcockian relationships. But I think we may be operating under slightly different definitions of the word "adult." By "adult relationship," I meant something more like a relationship that has largely overcome the very adult conflicts (Oedipal, Electral, and otherwise) that plague it. But since nobody makes movies about relationships that have already overcome their significant conflicts, unless the relationship is incidental to the plot of the film, my definition of "adult relationships" applies to very few films about relationships. I can only defend myself by saying that I was referring to the way in which relationships are resolved, or left slightly unresolved, in Hitchcock's movies.

I am a big Hitchcock fan (Notorious and Rear Window being among my favorites), and I agree completely with Richard's assessments of the relationships in Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock does cast an adult eye on romantic relationships in a way that very few contemporary films can match. But very few of his movies, other than Notorious and perhaps North by Northwest, suggest a way out of the conflict. Take Rear Window, for instance. Richard is correct, of course, about the movie's portrayal of a highly sexualized, adult, non-married relationship, but the only thing that's different about the relationship at the end of the movie from the relationship at the beginning of the movie is that the Jimmy Stewart character has become more invested in it by incorporating the Grace Kelly character into his voyeuristic fantasies. The moment when Jeff really begins to care about Lisa is the moment in which she becomes a participant in the "moving picture" he has been watching.

Hitchcock's plots are resolved, but the relationships he depicts are often left in limbo. Even when the movie ends "happily," there's no sense that the relationship has been transformed, that it's something essentially different from what it was before. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that that is a more adult characterization of human relationships, and that it's actually childish of me to expect or want a movie to provide the kind of resolution that doesn't often happen in "real life." So while I agree with Richard's analysis of Hitchcock's adult vision, I miss, in the resolutions to Hitchcock's films, a sense of completeness that I associate with fully mature relationships. Or maybe it's just that the only celluloid relationships I can imagine as "complete" are the ones in which Cary Grant plays a part.

Richard ends by making a suggestion about film analysis that I wholeheartedly endorse: "You know, perhaps the whole 'male gaze' buzzphrase in feminist film studies years ago would have been more interesting if it had been about the 'child's gaze' or the 'adult's gaze.'" Much of current Hollywood adult fare offers a childish vision of human life and relationships. For a more adult vision, or for a kind of Dickensian "double vision," you have to turn to Finding Nemo.