Hitchcock’S Appetites Ii Hitchcock’S Appetites the Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread
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Hitchcock’s Appetites ii Hitchcock’s Appetites The corpulent plots of desire and dread CASEY MCKITTRICK Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc NEW YORK • LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Casey McKittrick, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McKittrick, Casey. Title: Hitchcock’s appetites: the corpulent plots of desire and dread / Casey McKittrick. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015046298 (print) | LCCN 2015047482 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501311659 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501311628 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501311635 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899-1980–Health. | Motion picture producers and directors–United States–Biography. | Obesity. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Individual Director (see also BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts). | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.H58 M45 2016 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.H58 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/33092–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046298 Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Still from The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) © PARAMOUNT / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1165-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1162-8 ePub: 978-1-5013-1163-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 1 Hitchcock’s Hollywood diet 21 2 The Hitchcock cameo: Fat self-fashioning and cinematic belonging 43 3 The pleasures and pangs of Hitchcockian consumption 65 4 Appetite and temporality in Rear Window: Another aspect of voyeurism 101 5 Childhood and the challenge of fat masculinity 123 6 Hitchcock and the queer lens of fatness 139 Epilogue 159 Notes 165 Enhanced Filmography 176 Bibliography 193 Index 196 Acknowledgments irst, I would like to thank the English Department and the College of Arts Fand Sciences at Western Michigan University, for their generous support, encouragement, and mentorship. They were instrumental in allowing me to research and write this book, granting me a sabbatical to do archival work and begin the writing process. They were also wonderful listeners and advisors. I owe the entire first chapter to the fellowship I received in the summer of 2012 from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was allowed access to the David O. Selznick and Myron Selznick collections. The help, guidance, and information I received at the Harry Ransom Center made the book a possibility and a fait accompli. I am deeply indebted, in innumerable ways, to my parents Douglas and Sandra McKittrick, who introduced me to, and let me fall in love with, the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Janet Staiger has been a constant source of inspiration and support, for having read several of my chapters and shared her own work throughout a career that made me realize productivity and diligence were not just possible, but necessary. I would probably never have built my own scholarship around the films of Hitchcock if it weren’t for a dear friend and mentor, Dr. Sabrina Barton, whose essay on Strangers on a Train made me realize that good work in queer and feminist theory could be life-changing and nourishing in profound ways. The participants of the Hitchcock seminars and the members of the independent study groups at Western, with whom I shared my Hitchcock research, helped me write and grow in ways they will probably never fathom. I owe a debt particularly to Andrea Enyedi, Briana Asmus, and Tazara Owens. The support I got from friends and colleagues inside and outside the academy made the book happen as well. There are too many to name, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank John Saillant, Alex Barron, Elizabeth Brenner, Nic Witschi, Meg Dupuis, Kenneth Kidd, Heather Kirksey, Victoria Sheldon Parker, Daryl Kovalich, John Mancuso, Michael Nava, Nicholas Gamble, Christopher Carlsen, Michael Soldier, Steve Berman, Kimberly Hunter Soltero, Pamela Mottley, Shane Dietrich, David Gerstner, Eve Salisbury, Grace Tiffany, Nate Crumpton and other Fourth Coast companions, and Joshua Weaver. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii The editors with whom I’ve worked at Bloomsbury Academic, Katie Gallof and Mary Al-Sayed, have been more than understanding and tolerant of my recent illness, and hearing from them, getting advice from them, has been indispensable to my finishing this project. Finally, I’d like to thank Neville Hoad and Christopher Nagle for their friendship and their guidance, for providing not just emotional and intellectual support, but also a template of what it means to do scholarship with passion and integrity. viii Introduction They say that inside every fat man is a thin man trying desperately to get out. Now you know that the thin man is the real Alfred Hitchcock.1 One sometimes has the impression of Alfred Hitchcock wearing an Alfred Hitchcock mask, or that inside that fat man there is a fat man struggling to get out.2 rom the time Alfred Hitchcock made his historic 1939 move from Shamley FGreen, outside London, to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood, until his death forty years later, no publicity piece, film review, or interview with the director was complete without at least a perfunctory reference to, or a loving jab at, his formidable physique. Before he had even acquired that most familiar of monikers, “The Master of Suspense,” in 1942, he had been embraced by the American press with headlines like “300-Pound Prophet Comes to Hollywood,” “Heavy Heavy . Hitchcock,” and “Director Hitchcock, Big As An Elephant.” A publicity still for his first American picture Rebecca reassured us, “‘Hitch’ doesn’t mind allusions to his 239 pounds.” Since his passing, the many biographical and critical accounts of the man and his work have continued to find references to his weight, size, or appetites, to be de rigueur. Whether these references function as amusing anecdotes about an idiosyncratic auteur, or as more serious and penetrating ruminations on the driving compulsions of his life, they seem to suggest Hitchcock’s fatness as a fundamental truth about him. In some ways, this is a book about the thin man and the fat man identified in the above quotations, and their lifelong attempts to escape from the fleshly prison of a man born Alfred Joseph Hitchcock. It is also about the artist born from this trinity of selves that fought one another for sovereignty of expression. The “mask” described above by Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor is that of the globally known and revered persona: the pear-shaped, unflappable, droll, ironic, sweetly morbid Brit who produced fabulous and unpredictable cinema. The thin man trying to escape was an elaborate and important creation 2 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES of Hitchcock’s own mind. He envisioned a man who looked the way he felt: charismatic, limber, romantic, endlessly creative, energetic, and in on the joke. The fat man imagined by Taylor is the one described in Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: a man who hated his body—Hitchcock once called it an “armour of fat”—and even more, hated how his body was read by others, particularly in a culture given to interpret fatness as idleness, stupidity, and lack of self-awareness or discipline. The interplay of these three selves—the public commodity, the ambitious visionary, and the tortured outsider—produced one of cinema’s greatest directors, and his greatness, I argue, owes a great deal to his own struggles with the signifying practices of the fat body. This is the first book-length study of Hitchcock to consider how his experiences as a fat man, and a fat celebrity, found their expression in his cinema.3 More specifically, the following chapters argue that his fatness informed and inflected his cinematic strategies of representation, his understanding of gender and its embodiment, and, more generally, his conception of the corporeal. They also insist that we cannot understand his relationship to his fatness without also understanding his relationship to food and drink, which were, for him, some of the greatest pleasures in his life, and also the source of his greatest anxieties. Using archival research of Hitchcock’s publicity, his script collaborations, and personal communications with producers and media outlets, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, my aim in this book is to produce a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock’s creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism. This profile is an invitation to revisit the Hitchcock oeuvre, with an eye, and a stomach, toward the question of his appetites. Why appetites? The question of appetites is likely to crop up, almost implicitly, in any discussion of Alfred Hitchcock and his films. By 1955, the Hitchcock profile was the most recognizable one on the planet, and that may still be the case. In the cultural imaginary, it is difficult, if not impossible, to extract Hitchcock the auteur, the cultural icon, or the historical personage, from his fatness. Nor is it easy to consider Hitchcock apart from his cinematic excesses and the erotics of consumption that permeates his films.