Timing and Vulnerability in Three Hitchcock FilmsAuthor(s): Marta FiglerowiczSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 49-58Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/FQ.2012.65.3.49 .

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1One of the last scenes of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) finds its protagonists at a London embassy. A disaffected diplomatic crowd looks on as Jo McKenna (Doris Day) sings the same kitsch tune over and over, louder and louder. Noisy Americans, their looks seem to say. We are by now in on the joke. Jo and her husband Ben (James Stewart) have spent most of their time abroad being markedly more audible than everyone else. They have exuberantly shared their life story with a stranger on a bus to Marrakesh; growled at each other at a Moroccan restau-rant; yelled and sobbed at two sets of policemen; shrieked at stuffed animals at a taxidermist’s, rung a church bell—and, just lately, screamed off-beat over the orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Until the last quarter of the film, the McKennas are represented through embarrassment. Whether by virtue of their nationality or of their professions (doctor and Broadway singer), the McKennas speak loudly and brashly, in a way that instantly attracts attention. Their loudness registers as embarrassing in early parts of the film because the couple do not seem aware of how much attention they are drawing or of how deeply they are getting themselves into trouble. As a result, they seem at once more powerful and more vulnerable than those around them. Commanding everyone’s ears and eyes, they thereby also invite passersby to use them as these other persons see fit.

As Jo lifts her voice in the embassy, we still do not know how these fine shades of agency and responsibility should be parsed out. Yet suddenly this no longer matters. The recital of “Que Sera, Sera” exposes her whole bouquet of vulnerabilities: she is loud, tacky, socially oblivious. But this abandon also brings Jo all she seems to have wished for.

Her excess voice, soon woven with the whistling of her son Hank (Christopher Olsen), gathers all loose plot ends into what—in less than five minutes—will be a relieving, comfort-ing finale.

Disrupted by loudness, the McKenna’s world eventually comes to be harmonized by it. What crystallizes the transi-tion are two scenes shortly preceding this one. The first takes place in Ambrose Chapel shortly after Ben has been knocked out by Hank’s kidnapper Edward Drayton (Bernard Miles). Drayton and the assassin he has hired to kill a foreign prime minister are in the rectory together. The assassination is to take place that evening during a concert in the Albert Hall. Edward twice replays the crash of cymbals at which the assassin can inaudibly shoot the prime minister. It is at this point that we realize—if we have not already—how system-atic is the conspirators’ quiet demeanor. If the McKennas have been louder than average, Edward and his wife Lucy (Brenda de Banzie), who met the McKennas in Marrakesh, have been more than typically hushed. By being so quiet, they have skirted the attention the McKennas’ loudness has tended to gather and that the Draytons’ illicit activity would actually deserve. The Draytons have thereby accrued such power and mastery over their environment that they may now attempt, in their same quiet fashion, to kill a head of state. They have been using the impolitely loud McKennas in the exact way they are about to use a pair of cymbals.

This parallel would suffice to make us pause; but the scene is not over. After the assassin leaves, Edward lingers in the rectory. He walks back to his gramophone and replays the key crescendo one last, third time, entirely alone. Right as the cymbals crash, Hitchcock cuts to a bird’s-eye view of the assassin driving away from the chapel and to two dramatic violin chords on the soundtrack that almost (but no more than almost) mesh with the composition Edward has just played.

It is hard not to watch this sequence with a surprised, pained sympathy. This is our first glimpse of Edward not

TIMING AND VULNERABILITY IN THREE HITCHCOCK FILMS

MARTA FIGLEROWICZ RetHINKs THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, MARNIE, aND FRENZY

Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3, pps 49–58, IssN 0015-1386, electronic, IssN 1533-8630. © 2012 by the Regents of the university of California. all rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/fQ.2012.65.3.49

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The Man Who Knew Too Much. © 1955 Filwite productions inc. DVD: Universal studios.

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

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merely as a political tool but as a person in his own right; as someone whose own self and story might hold our attention. Hitchcock does not open this space of compassion by letting us overhear Edwards disclosing his thoughts. Instead, he has us imagine the film’s climactic music played for Edwards’s ears only, timed only to his rise in prominence—as if the emotional arc this music augurs were primarily his own, as if it were primarily his narrative that our minds should have been tracing while watching The Man Who Knew Too Much. Edward becomes embarrassing—for the first time in this film—because of the huge discrepancy between the degree of agency and attention his gesture implicitly assumes and the brusqueness with which Hitchcock’s shots instantly break with Edward’s perspective. In just a second Hitchcock will fix our eyes on an accelerating car, then again on the distraught McKennas. The jolt from the gramophone’s cymbals to the violin chords on our soundtrack—whose tempo is equally dramatic but differently timed—at once connects us back to Edward and pulls us away from him. It makes us aware both of how vulnerably the shot centered upon him had demanded our attention and of how easily we now let ourselves be paced by other sights and sounds. The literary critic Alex Woloch in The One vs. The Many (Princeton University Press, 2003) has observed that novelistic characters are made more or less difficult to feel for by how frequently and explicitly the narra-tive they figure in makes them the center of its attention. In this scene and the climax that follows Hitchcock seems to be making use of an analogous cinematic effect.

Edwards’s fragile moment of grandeur also opens a struc-tural possibility within embarrassment that was not made explicit before. The film’s characters have no stable degree of agency they could guard or return to. Whatever mastery they claim over themselves is always contingent on other persons’ fickle attentiveness. But perhaps the one way to escape this constant state of being embarrassed or fearing embarrass-ment is to abandon yourself entirely to others; to accept that you are nothing more than a collection of external acts of attention and—since little more now matters—to dream that the whole orchestra might someday play just for you, per-fectly timed to your needs and feelings as they rise and fall. It may be that none of Hitchcock’s characters consciously make this discovery. But it is in such an accident of perfect timing that The Man Who Knew Too Much finds its plot’s formal and affective resolution.

Edward’s gramophone gives us a drawing-room version of what, in the scene that follows, will become a full-blown per-formance. The concert starts in the Albert Hall. Hitchcock hushes all noise that otherwise might (and, realistically speaking, should) reach us from characters. All we hear is the

composition slowly rising to its fateful crescendo. Meanwhile, the camera roves. From a broad view of the orchestra it zooms in on the soprano, then on the percussionists. It frames the prime minister’s blissful face, the smug assassin, Jo sobbing behind the back seats of the parterre, Ben rushing into the venue and up the stairs. These alternating shots continue until the cymbals crash—Jo screams—and the assassin falls to his death onto the parquet circle. The audience turns with Jo and gasps in a collective echo of her horror.

From a simple formalist perspective, this scene captures in synchronic fashion the film’s whole structure. All main actors are gathered in a single space, their motivations written on their faces. The music these persons hear and see per-formed is also an apt soundtrack expressing the mood of this scene. (This is uncanny: had the assassination been shot in a forest or at a metro station, this would still be a likely score for us to hear.) It seems as if this music were gathering up and feeding back to us, as well as to the characters, the network of actions and feelings we have up till now witnessed; as if it were reminding us that all these persons have been part of a narrative orchestra, each playing his or her role for our benefit.

But two things trouble such a reading of this scene. First, now that we hear the whole piece and not only two bars, we realize this is sentimental, overblown music. It calls us to immerse ourselves but also makes us feel a little sticky if we do so. Second, we still remember Edward’s gramophone. As the camera passes from character to character, framing them one by one in portrait close-ups, it prompts us to imagine for a few seconds (as it did with Edward) that the score is timed only to this person’s narrative and emotional arc. The music does seem to express each person in turn with startling accuracy. When the camera stops over the prime minister, the music wallows in his prestige. When it stops over the assassin, the rising crescendo paces his plan. When it stops over Ben or Jo, the score speeds toward the danger their son is facing, expressing at once their hurry and the difficulty of their choice. The snapshot rapidity of these shifts impresses upon us that all these stories cannot be sustained at once. We are reminded that, in the end, only one person or couple will get their wish—that, by the end of the concert, the music will have played out only one of these fantasies of alignment. Other characters will be reduced to fragments and viewers of this single triumphant narrative. They will sink into an embarrassment Hitchcock will not even bother to explore, which we now anticipate in the discrepancy between each character’s visible self-absorption and the camera’s constant rush to move on to other faces.

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The Draytons try to make this music their own—to make collective attention revolve around their needs—by denying that they are worthy of scrutiny. The McKennas initially suffer because they are unable even to meld into an average crowd, let alone render themselves unnoticeable. But as the film progresses, their loudness becomes increas-ingly charismatic. After an ineffectively chaotic outburst at the Moroccan police station, their tearful encounter with Scotland Yard and their following vehement phone calls start to seem seductive in their helplessness. Now, at this moment of high crisis, Jo uses her loudness directly against the assassin’s silence right as his silence was to prove noise’s superior. She defeats him because he cannot help but have his attention diverted by her loud presence and misses his target. Her cry succeeds in making her the center of every person’s focus, including his own. Hitchcock makes it unclear whether Jo could have known what effect her scream would have, whether she meant it as a warning call or as an outburst of defeat. Her voice seems at once the most helpless and the most powerful presence in the Albert Hall, an accidentally successful form of the abandonment we ear-lier caught Edward practice.

Jo’s victory—echoed by her analogous success at the embassy—is relieving. All loose plot threads seem to have found a single, linear trajectory, made audibly public and publicly accepted by every person’s shift of attention toward Jo. But if we look closer, the tension that preceded this final optimism is still there. At the heart of this tension is the fact that we have not really stepped out of embarrassment. Vulnerability and power have become undistinguishable not because Jo has accepted her dependence on attention (we do not know whether she truly has), but because her gestures of abandon seem to have been perfectly timed. It is not hard to imagine how Jo’s scream—had its timing been just slightly different—might have turned into a moment of painful self-exposure or of equally painful isolation. Indeed, we cannot be sure whether Jo’s scream did not in fact draw her audience’s attention too early or too late. The film did focus around Jo and Ben’s victory too hastily to attend to several persons who died or will die as a result of the McKennas’ triumph (the assassin, and probably the Draytons). Jo’s scream may also have come too late to stop the Draytons from causing Hank permanent emotional harm. We catch a glimpse of Hank’s terrified glance as he and his father descend the embassy staircase to rejoin Jo in the lobby. Hank’s look is never overtly commented on but mutely opens up a mental wound it might be too late for his parents to heal. This is only a shadow of a tremor in The Man Who Knew Too Much. In Marnie (1964) and Frenzy (1972) such concern with timing becomes much

more overt, and much more clearly doomed to failure. These later films also make more explicit the question of what it means to evaluate such mistimed or accidentally well-timed selves in ethical terms.

2Leave me alone! cries Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hendren) and runs into the honeymoon suite bedroom she shares with Mark Rutland (Sean Connery). Mark steps in—and with one gesture, so quick we hardly see it, rips her nightshirt open. It falls in a ring around her feet. Marnie’s eyes go blank. Mark wraps the naked Marnie in his bathrobe, embraces her, apol-ogizes, and lays himself on top of her as she had told him not to. Marnie has been reiterating that Mark pegged her too early as a woman who needs to be tamed. Mark keeps responding that her intense hostility comes from conditions that precede his presence in her life. Between Marnie’s nakedness and Mark’s insistence, we are left to wonder what we are seeing—what we should be seeing—and how we can prevent ourselves from being rushed into these choices.

When we meet her, Marnie’s life is a whirl of disjointed fragments. She is a compulsive thief plagued by what seems to be an unknown past trauma; she has nightmares whose narrative she cannot place; she is shaken by thunderstorms and by the color red. Her forms of release are similarly epi-sodic: stealing, and—after each successful caper—a ride on her beloved horse Forio. She seems unable to work toward any long-term friendships or relationships besides the family bond her mother Bernice Edgar (Louise Latham) systemati-cally fractures. She switches names, jobs, and hair colors at the drop of a hat. Even her mother knows nothing of her criminal activity. Rather than stick to one consistent lie, she jumps from one fabrication to another as soon as Mark or her mother show any trace of doubt. The stories she invents are themselves all full of deaths, betrayals, abuses, necessary breaks of contact. Among these ruptures, it is hard to draw a clear line between the ones by which Marnie is victimized and the ones she uses to understand or to protect herself. Instead of helping us make that distinction, Hitchcock keeps showing characters who seem to hurt Marnie by consistently treating her as either willful or passive. Her mother never overtly acknowledges that Marnie’s accusatory outbursts might be helpless demands for love. Her former employer Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel) self-righteously demonizes her as a thieving seductress. Mark claims that he knows better than Marnie what she should want, and rapes her. As a result, although it seems that Marnie’s lifestyle is created by a pre-determined framework she keeps imposing upon her world, it also seems each way we try to focus this framework—as an

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Marnie. © 1964 geoffrey stanley inc. DVD: Universal studios.

MArNIE

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expression either of agency or victimhood—repeats the haste for which we may want to blame or pity her, as well as the haste that makes other characters hurt her.

Mark, a rich businessman, catches Marnie at a robbery attempt and forces her to marry him so he can cure her. His overt strategy of coping with the world is the direct inverse of hers. Like Marnie, Mark is represented externally, through his relationship to other parts of his environment. He is a person who keeps creating continuities and easily turns oth-ers into tools of his willpower. Mark wheedles his father (Alan Napier) into accepting his marriage. He makes his cousin Bob (Bob Sweeney) work through the night to cover up Marnie’s thefts. He is effective in shooing away a man who pursues Marnie at a racetrack when she is not. While Marnie is being interviewed for a job at his company, one nod from Mark suffices to make his manager (S. John Launer) employ her.

Mark’s apparent need for coherence and order is coercive but also vulnerable. As with Marnie, Hitchcock always makes it seem too early to tell whether this need is Mark’s most pow-erful form of self-assertion or his most unprotected blind spot. Each household scene he does not show up in reveals to us another person’s vision of our represented world—a cousin’s, an in-law’s, Strutt’s. Left alone, these persons complain that Mark does not care about how they feel. But they also worry he is sabotaging himself. In the course of the film he splurges, strains his family and business ties, becomes an accessory to theft, exposes himself to lies, insults, and rejections. It seems precipitate on Mark’s relatives’ part to treat him like Marnie’s victim. Yet it seems equally hasty to treat him the way Marnie does, like an aggressively selfish person. As viewers, we are made not so much to pity Mark or to condemn him for what seem to be his fixed ideas of happiness, but constantly to con-front the limitations of either attitude.

On their honeymoon cruise, Mark tells Marnie about insects that huddle into a beautiful floral shape to not be eaten up by birds. She looks strangely heron-like as Mark describes these insects: with her tall hairdo, jutting chin, glazed eyes, angled forearms. The Birds is not far away. Is Mark or Marnie the insect-flower? Is Marnie about to peck Mark or has she already been pecked at herself, beyond repair (and will the rape by Mark in the next scene con-tinue this fragmentation)? It seems both ways of focusing this scene are violations, at once of Mark’s integrity and of Marnie’s. They seem violating because they refuse to give either person the benefit of the doubt; they label Mark or Marnie as aggressor or as victim before checking whether the aggressor might also be hurt, or whether the victim has agency of her own. The way Hitchcock shoots this episode

makes it appear that Mark and Marnie are both trespass-ing in this fashion. His unrelentingly hurried speech and her stony gaze persist through a series of quick jumps from one part of the cruise ship to another, from one time of day to the next, through what is implicitly a period of several days. These repetitions make their defensive attitudes seem habitual rather than spontaneous; hardheaded rather than momentarily confused. Instead of settling into anger at one person and fear for the other, we are forced by a horror at this haste we see performed to allow our attention to be constantly dissatisfied, constantly hard at work preventing ourselves from distributing agency, awareness, pain, guilt.

The film’s shot structure reinforces this ambiance of excessive haste. Marnie has an uncommon number of rapidly juxtaposed close-ups onto individual faces that look directly at the camera in distaste, frustration, or suspicious scru-tiny, appearing and disappearing too quickly to be properly grounded or empathized with. In sparse shots that remain omniscient, some element of the landscape (a garish back-ground, a vaginal purse) always stands out as too hastily crude to be trusted as either reality or symbol. Marnie’s love scenes are almost documentary-like in detail, without the spiraling–screwing camera motion that made the kisses of Notorious (1946) or Vertigo (1956) famously sexy. Even as these love scenes insistently demand some interpretation, it always seems too early to tell if what we see is an act of love or of coercion, a surge of feeling or of frigid detachment. Marnie’s plot generally seems to have at once no climax and too many climaxes. For instance, when Marnie rides Forio after rob-bing Strutt, the swelling soundtrack suggests a great event has happened that we should rejoice with. But at that point we do not even know who Marnie is, and the film instantly cuts to her morose visit at her mother’s. The music seems to play only for her but then we brusquely move on to other things; we cannot tell if the film hastily cut Marnie’s joy too short, or whether we decided too early that hers is the viewpoint we should immerse ourselves in.

These fears of focusing too early are also present in Marnie’s final scenes. On a superficial level, the conclusion seems an analogue of the Albert Hall finale in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Marnie finally recalls her trauma. Her confession, like Jo’s shriek, registers as both helpless and commanding. It seems to be triggered by Mark and Bernice’s conversation but immediately claims central attention not as the side result of this exchange but as its focus and source of order. Hitchcock allows us to hope that this film will finally time itself around a single, coherent story that it will not be too hasty for us to accept because all characters will have aligned themselves with it seamlessly.

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But of course it is too soon to rest so easy. Marnie can only produce a full narrative in a fetishized child’s voice. She stays with Mark perhaps only because this is marginally better than jail. Her mother declares she loves Marnie but her leg still hurts when Marnie puts her head in her lap. Mark has elicited a narrative from Marnie but it is not the narrative of her victimization in which he persistently tried to make her believe. It seems that he has done violence to Marnie, forcing her into a resolution that makes her dependent on him for life. Or else Mark may have had his life broken and reorganized around another person’s story.

What highlights this disjointedness is the expressionistic use Hitchcock makes of his characters’ faces. Mark is not merely concerned, but triumphantly goading. Marnie’s face is locked back in the masklike traumatized expression from her childhood. Her mother’s face is gro-tesquely distorted first by anger, then by fear. Their expressions all seem to say, I knew this all along. In different circumstances, such confirmed expec-tations would be cathartic. But given how suspicious we have been made of haste—of ceasing to attend too early—this is perhaps the most unset-tling conclusion the film could leave us with. We are, in the end, unable to tell if these persons are all broken or if they are all impossible to break; if this return to the molds they seem to think from has made them painfully, unresolvedly self-conscious or more securely solipsistic. We are also, again, ourselves caught in the act of trying to shut these questions down too quickly. Marnie makes us fear it might be impossible to think—to guard an illusion of understanding—without such haste; that to leave a question (of insanity, of coercion, of goodwill, of solipsism) open is precisely the one thing we are unable con-sciously to do.

The last few seconds of the film give this conclusion a slightly different turn. When Marnie and Mark leave her mother’s house, it is not raining anymore but there is also no sunshine. There is no affect in Marnie’s and Mark’s faces. The children stop singing their insistently well-timed rhyme. This is not a moment of openness toward the other. It seems, rather, a moment of confused tiredness. If there is no hope for Marnie in high-energy haste, perhaps there is some hope in knowing this haste eventually will exhaust us. We will need to stop, and this might—sometimes, for a moment—fix our timing.

3This might be the most haunting scene in Frenzy; for many, it is the most disturbing scene Hitchcock shot. Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) locks Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) inside her office and starts to rape her. He grunts “lovely—lovely—lovely” to mark each thrust of his pelvis. Within each pause he leaves, Brenda whispers another line of a prayer. It is not long before Bob impotently misses his beat; he curses Brenda and takes off his tie. Brenda screams—then wheezes—until the tie noosed round her neck has cut her breath off.

Each repetition of Bob’s adjective singles out Brenda’s body as a wonder that should surprise us anew with each returning look we take. We are surprised; not because we share Bob’s desiring amazement, but because Brenda’s body is not lovely, lovely, lovely, not as we see it—even though

we probably wish we could unam-biguously, empathically call it so. The camera shows her body not as a complete aesthetic form but as a set of fragmented limbs and protrusions defenseless against the desire that tries to make them into a single form it fancies, to touch and weigh and take them as Bob’s “kind of woman.” Which Brenda should we feel for, the fragmented or the lovely one? Or the one who prays, whose prayer will so obviously not be answered? It is hard to be sure. Worse still, it seems no choice we make will matter. The

boundaries we draw to make sense of this scene all seem belated, empty abstractions.

This scene alone shows how eerily Frenzy amalgamates patterns in Marnie and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The fragment culminates in an inverted, traumatizing version of Jo’s concert-hall screaming. Before this climax, we are locked in a version of the struggle between Mark and Marnie. As in Marnie, a happy resolution is denied us because our attention cannot focus properly. Brenda’s rape is distressing because we constantly lose from sight the person toward whom our sad-ness should be directed.

But in Frenzy, our attention is not troubled because it seems too hasty. Instead, Frenzy is plagued by delay. By the time Brenda begins to struggle for her life, we realize it is too late—that it was already too late when Bob walked into this room. Attention could have served Brenda—should have served her—but did not, considerably before this shot began. As viewers, we are also placed at a point where our attention is not merely unfocused but useless. We cannot understand—

In his central characters and his

central scenes Hitchcock places

us at a point where attentiveness

to limits comes to seem entirely

futile. Characters (and we) failed

to pay attention to how and

when boundaries were being

formed and reformed; now it is

too late to make amends.

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Frenzy. © 1972 Universal pictures Limited. DVD: Universal studios.

FrENzy

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we will not understand—any deep reason why Bob is raping Brenda. There is nothing we can attend to in this room that could potentially save her. No amount of anger or fear on our part can change what already happened long before we could have known how angry or fearful we would need to be.

Set in London, Frenzy follows two main characters, Bob and Dick Blaney (Jon Finch). Bob is a serial killer who in the course of the film rapes several women and strangles them with his tie. Dick is a bartender whom Bob tries to frame for these killings. Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) is initially fooled by Bob but eventually proves Dick’s inno-cence. The experience of lateness foregrounded during Bob’s assault on Brenda paces the plot of this film from the start. In its opening shot, a government official unwittingly starts preaching against pollution over a river upon which has been floating a corpse. When the film cuts to his workplace, Dick does not seem to sense how much his boss dislikes him until he pours himself a morning drink and gets fired for stealing liquor. Dick also did not seem to know how much he needed Brenda (who still helps him out financially) till he divorced her. Most centrally, Dick does not realize that Bob is the tie murderer until Bob has already killed Brenda and Dick’s current lover Babs (Anna Massey) and framed Dick for it. Such delays also plague all of the other main characters. Oxford did not know how quickly his wife would become unattractive to him until they married. Babs does not know Bob is a murderer until the door closes behind them in his flat. Bob does not know Babs pulled out his characteristic tiepin while he was strangling her until he has stowed her body away in a potato truck. The potato-truck driver does not notice that Bob has climbed into the truck to retrieve this pin until Babs’s mutilated corpse has fallen out onto the road. Oxford does not suspect Dick might be innocent until he has had him sentenced. In the last scene of the film, Dick (who has escaped from prison) rushes into Bob’s apartment wanting to kill him—but does not realize that the person in Bob’s bed is a woman’s corpse until he has already cracked her head open. The viewer also comes to all these scenes too late. Whenever the camera moves to any person or group, characters’ lapses of attention have already been at work for quite some time. All we are given to see is the moment at which attention proves useless to solve this past mistake. For example, Bob and Babs are already planning to go over to his place (where Babs will be killed) when the film cuts to their conversation in Covent Garden. Dick pours himself a morning scotch before we even know he has a boss. Babs has long taken Bob’s pin by the time Hitchcock alerts us to its absence. Naked bodies are thrown into our field of vision without warning or preparation. Rapes are explicitly shown in

a film whose director spent decades showing little more than legs and faces. Most famously, when Babs and Bob disappear in Bob’s flat, the camera moves backwards out of the house instead of following them—as if to emphasize there is noth-ing more our ears and eyes can do.

These constant delays make considerations of agency not merely convoluted, but useless. It seems beside the point to say that Brenda should have known how Bob would treat her, or that Bob should have known not to rape women—or, conversely, that they are both passive victims of an oppres-sive system. By framing the film through such questions, we give ourselves the choice of being disgusted by Hitchcock’s characters or pitying them. But to pity Frenzy’s characters is to adopt the pose detective Oxford takes toward his dinners, to spew them out and then politely pretend to consider tak-ing them into ourselves. It is to assume a pose of concerned interest while denying that you were also ambushed by what the film presents. To be disgusted is to act like Dick’s RAF friend Johnny Porter (Clive Swift) and his wife Monica Barling (Jean Marsh), who violently assert they need not take part in this dirty affair while glossing over how deeply Dick’s and Babs’s life is already entwined with, and similar to, their own. Pity and disgust are tempting because they allow us to claim we do have well-controlled boundaries—that we con-sciously decided to let someone into these boundaries, or that we consciously refused someone the right to violate them. Yet, it seems that Oxford and Dick’s friends can represent these attitudes only because these characters are spared the full impact of the film’s experiences of lateness. They have enough luck, time, and room partitioning to create retroac-tive pretenses of self-control. To align ourselves with them as viewers or as critics is to disregard the central problem of attention the film confronts us with.

In his central characters and his central scenes Hitchcock places us at a point where attentiveness to limits comes to seem entirely futile. Characters (and we) failed to pay atten-tion to how and when boundaries were being formed and reformed; now it is too late to make amends. The film finds three ways of representing this uselessness of attention: rage, numbness, and laughter.

Bob can never be sufficiently aroused by the women he rapes. Terrifyingly, it is as if he were always unable to attend to this insufficiency before the rape is underway; as if he were never able to see the cycle he is in as a problem. His disap-pointment instantly spirals: he accuses his victim of being like all other women he has known and kills her instantly. Dick falls into such excesses of anger incrementally: he first crushes a bunch of grapes Bob gave to him, then screams more and more violently at Brenda, at his RAF friend, at the

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58 spring 2012

court that tries him—and finally escapes from prison and sets out to kill Bob. This wild, explosive aggression is always made to seem misdirected, or directed at a far larger entity than the person at hand. By letting it greatly exceed its object, Hitchcock makes such aggression register as a challenge not merely to another person’s infraction but to this other person herself; not merely to the person but the entire kind she stands for, the entire system of boundaries within which the raging person seems to feel trapped. As a result, these rages are moments at once of protest and of forgetting. They focus on these persons’ ties of agency and obligation briefly to make them seem wholly unbound.

Brenda’s manifest response to Bob is numbness. “I won’t struggle,” she says, and starts to pray. Other characters echo this reaction. Two policemen are dumbstruck to see Babs’s corpse fall out of the car. Dick seems to fall into a stupor when he finds out about Babs’s death, when the police find him after a prolonged manhunt, when he realizes he has muti-lated a corpse. Numbness—but one from which there is no issue—is also represented by the film’s many corpses, whose still, apparently indifferent nakedness Hitchcock makes us observe repeatedly and at great length. In all these cases, persons who have just very strongly asserted their boundar-ies seem entirely to recede from this pursuit. For a moment Hitchcock leaves us with no cues as to these persons’ agency over or attitude toward what just happened to them, in what seems to be the stillness of an attention so overwhelmed that it can only register its confusion by shutting down.

Equally frequent as Frenzy’s moments of numbness or stupor are moments when the film becomes absurdly comic. Two men joke in a bar at the beginning of the film; Oxford and his wife as well as Dick and Babs tease each other even when talking about corpses. Humor that seems intended pri-marily for the viewer abounds even more flagrantly. Babs’s rapid willingness to be persuaded of Dick’s innocence when he takes her out to a park with trees and flowers is farcical, as are Oxford’s wife’s snobbish meals and her key role in making Bob seem suspicious to her husband. At the hotel where Dick and Babs stop for one night, the owners engage in prolonged Wildean wordplay about lust, neckties, and naive women. Johnny Porter’s wife accuses Dick of being forced to divorce Brenda “on the grounds of exceptional cruelty” while spread-ing out her arms in a conscious or unconscious imitation of bondage. Bob’s attempts at retrieving his pin from Babs’s stiffened hand—during which he seems to perform oral sex on her corpse, and Babs’s stiffened toes famously look like small potatoes—are downright burlesque. While Bob is in the potato truck, a car light turns the scene into a parody of Marnie’s red flashbacks. Shortly after Babs’s body has

been treated like a vegetable, Hitchcock inverts the pun. Bob and Dick’s employer take turns biting their knuckles while surrounded by Covent Garden fruit. These connec-tions between food and corpses are transferred into Oxford’s kitchen. The food he eats looks cadaverous. As his wife hears of Babs’s fingers broken post mortem, she snaps a breadstick and replicates the sound Babs’s fingers made.

One would want to sees Frenzy’s humor as an ironic demonstration and critique of male misogyny. But these moments could only be read as satire or irony if the film gave us a steady background of personal boundaries or a standard of self-awareness whose trespass these scenes ridi-culed. This is not a satisfaction we are ever given. Indeed, it seems that the characters’ lags of attention are simply being multiplied by Frenzy’s wordplay and semantic transfers. We are invariably too slow to see coming these new connections among sounds, images, and meanings. The kind of laughter Hitchcock elicits thus becomes primarily a gesture of aban-don, a momentary refusal to keep leveling with a world full of connections so odd that we could never have predicted we would be asked to draw meaning from them. Like numbness and rage, laughter is another state of boundary indifference Frenzy’s persistent lateness can bring us to.

All three responses put us in a position in which ethics, as the maintenance and negotiation of personal boundaries, is no longer a valid perceptual framework. To persist in a world paced by delays, the selves Hitchcock represents occa-sionally need to be reconstituted in a way that no longer takes such limits into account. These are not moments of epis-temic openness or transcendence, or reconciliation, but of what seems presented as mere exhaustion and overload. Are we being told to be frightened that we can sometimes reach these points—or to be pained that we do not reach them nearly as quickly as we would like? But to ask these questions is already to be back within ethics, the field numbness, laugh-ter, and rage take a necessary break from. Hitchcock seems most concerned with how easily the self migrates into these latter states; how impossible it is to predict which of the three we will find ourselves in, or to protect ourselves from them through any form of vigilance or ethics.

MaRta fIGLeROWICZ is a doctoral candidate in english at the university of California, Berkeley.

aBstRaCt this essay studies three Hitchcock films to argue that their character con-struction—especially their construction of characters’ vulnerability—is structured around patterns of timing or mistiming. It also asks more broadly what this formal choice can tell us about these films’ treatment of ethics.

KeYWORDs The Man Who Knew Too Much, Marnie, Frenzy, alfred Hitchcock, ethics and cinema

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