HANS-ULRICH MOHR Hitchcock and Dark Romanticism

Home , Dark romanticism, The Lodger (opera)

1. Hitchcock as a Dark Auteur In 1966, François Truffaut, the later renowned film director, published a book entitled Hitchcock that recorded his conversations with Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut 1978). With this book he was the first one to praise Hitchcock not only as one of the greatest inventors of forms and expressions in the history of film but also as the ideal case of what is called an auteur. That is, he considered him a film director who shaped his highly creative films down to the minutest detail, despite the many people who had a share in the production (Rebello 2013, 168-170). No one has seriously contradicted this assessment. Consequently, Hitchcock's films must be regarded as the outcome of his personality and activities. Hitchcock's attitude can already be found in the images he propagated to the public about himself and his works. The following picture shows him with what looks like a raven (or, possibly, an American crow). This was one of the ways Hitchcock announced his film The Birds (1963). In this film, an aggressive large flock of birds attacks a small Californian coastal village and more or less destroys it. Optically, black corvidae, i.e. crows and ravens, dominate. Acoustically the croaking/cawing of ravens and crows is mixed with the panic-inducing screech of gulls. These birds symbolise the psychological tensions between several women: mother, sister, discarded love and sweetheart-to-be, who rival for the affections of one man. In fact, bird is also a vernacular British word for girls and women.

Figure 1: Hitchcock posing with a (trained) raven /American crow (Harris and Lasky 1976, 221). This image alludes to Edgar Allan Poe's famous ballad The Raven (cf. Hitchcock 1997), which deals with a poet who recently lost his young love Lenore and wants to drive away his bleak thoughts by reading ancient lore. In that dull winter night, suddenly a raven knocks at the window shutter and, when it is opened, flies into the room and seats itself on the helmet of a bust of Pallas Athena – as if claiming dominion over this goddess of rationality and wisdom. With its deep blackness and its mysterious

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.3 (Winter 2020): 205-225.

oracle-like utterances this raven seems to establish a telepathic relationship between the poet's mind and his unconscious as well as with the world beyond. A similar image propagated by Hitchcock, which is widely circulated on the dust jacket of Patrick McGilligan's copious book on Hitchcock's life and work, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (McGilligan 2003), shows Hitchcock with a crow/raven resting on top of his head and covering it, similar to Poe's raven on top of Athena's helmet (available by 'googling'). These examples underline that Hitchcock was much aware of the fact that his manifold and rich opus was particularly informed by what is termed Dark Romanticism. But, of course, our image does not simply present an equation between Hitchcock's mind and (dark) Romanticism. Rather, it presents an interaction. Slightly unlike the situation in Poe's poem, the raven seems to communicate in a more direct way with Hitchcock. Obviously, there is a more complex reciprocity underlying this scene, and this will require comprehensive investigation. This means we will have to trace Hitchcock's specific dependence on and his continuation of the Romanticist heritage.

2. Romanticist Ideas in Hitchcock's Films The themes and contents of Dark Romanticism have been lined out in a catchy and almost effusive way in a book published in 1930 by the Italian Mario Praz under the title La Winter Journals Carne, la Morte e il Diavolo nella Litteratura romantica. The English title The Romantic Agony (1933) restricts itself – somewhat prudishly – to the element of depressive and disturbing inner conflicts, as if this were the only content of romantic art and literature, neglecting its sources in the interplay of sexuality, desire, madness, delusions,Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) and death.1 Praz's book provides a lot of material and cross-references and suggests transmedial continuities, correlating literature and the arts. It deals with love, ecstatic as well as

for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution forbidden, the metamorphoses of Satan, vampirism, mythical creatures, monsters, and the beauty of the Terrible. Praz considers these themes the expression of a radical change in mentality, called Romanticism. For him Romanticism is more than a temporary attitude. It is a period in which artistic creativity emancipates itself from the dictates of external purposes such as religion, aristocratic representation, ideologies, and morals and thus can spread out extensively (Praz 1970a, 374-379 [afterword]). For Praz, this manifests itself especially as Dark Romanticism, an uninhibited advanced dimension within the new space of artistic freedom. He draws a line from medieval narratives of the devil up to de Sade, M.G. Lewis, Beckford, Byron, Maturin, Poe, Flaubert, Soulié, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and D'Annunzio. He deals with the femme fatale in the works of Keats, Swinburne, Wilde etc. He also touches on the fields of aestheticism, decadence, occultism, and fin-de-siècle – though not truly in an academic way. His book conveys the spirit of a sensationalist discovery made by a librarian turned connoisseur and dandy – all of which he was, in fact. Considering these topics, Hitchcock remains more in 'bright' daylight although his character and inclination may have been quite like Praz's. Hitchcock's relative brightness surely has to do with the filmic medium which is liable to relatively strict

1 The title of the German translation Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik (Praz 1970) adds a touch of relaxed acceptance and systematic literary history.

public censorship (cf. Medved 1992, 281-284; 320-336). Until recently, film production and viewing were under highly critical observation by religious, moralistic, and political factions: on the one hand, because film is a medium in the centre of the public sphere, and, on the other, because its pictorial quality has a realistic appeal that functions more directly than texts or speech. Hitchcock's first more developed film of a certain length (88 min.), the intertitled silent film The Lodger (1926), deals with the search for a London serial killer of young women with blond curls. Hitchcock narrates the events of the film in dimly-lit scenes, which were inspired by his encounter with German filmic Expressionism (black and white silent films) at the Babelsberg studios in 1924. Lotte Eisner has made an often quoted and widely accepted observation: "It is reasonable that German cinema is a development of German Romanticism and that modern technique merely lends a visible form to romantic fantasies" (Eisner 1969, 113). Expressionism tries to visualize the thematic heritage of Dark Romanticism – as there are psychological tensions down to the unconscious, sexuality, existential fears, the influence of irrational forces, and a dismal fate – by modelling the pictorial space in geometrical shapes, especially through the opposition and the configuration of light and shadow. Hitchcock attributes the strongest influence on his earlier work to Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919) by the German film director Robert Wiene. Furthermore, he explicitly adds F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch (McGilligan 2003, 64). At the centre of action of The Lodger is a young woman whose looks agree with a serial killer's taste and who is thus – especially from the viewer's perspective – exposed to various risks. A young man, who is a lodger in her parents' house, behaves in a highly suspicious manner. The film, however, climaxes in the revelation that this alleged murderer is innocent. He acted suspiciously only because he was in search of his sister's murderer. In fact, he turns out to be a kind of fairy tale prince, leading the young woman to marital bliss. This ending may be seen as a bow to censorship or to an audience in expectation of harmony, but it is also a premonition of a topic that would continue to occupy Hitchcock's thoughts: the difficulty of keeping guilt and innocence apart – an idea already at the heart of (dark) Romanticism. In Blackmail (1929), a film which Hitchcock had first realized as a silent one but immediately after reshot as a sound film, a young woman stabs a man who lured her into his apartment under the pretext to portray her and then tried to rape her. Nevertheless, in both versions, the subject of crime and murder is of secondary importance. Rather, the leading question is whether the woman is guilty or not and this remains unresolved. Surveying Hitchcock's immense output – it comprises 53 films and many TV features – one can indeed see an increasing interest in the (dark) romantic topic of the abysses of the human soul and the ultimate impossibility to identify guilt and innocence. This he effects via an intensification of the aesthetic appeal, based on an underlying irony. The films I will deal with in the following represent relevant steps in that process. In Rebecca (1940), the first film in Hitchcock's Hollywood phase (1939-1971), the question is whether the English aristocrat Maxim de Winter has murdered Rebecca, his first wife. This is presented to the viewer through the perspective of his second wife, an insecure young woman, nameless throughout the film, naively in love with Maxim. She fears to be married to a murderer (who may even be a threat to her own life as well)

and, at the same time, she feels pressured by her new status role as the lady of Manderley Castle, in particular as the deceased Rebecca is held up to her as an unsurpassable model in terms of refinement and elegance. In the end, it turns out that Rebecca seems to have possessed style but that she led a debauched life. Faced with a deadly disease she staged her suicide in a way that made her husband appear to have caused her death. In the early minutes of Rope (1948), a film that is based on an actual murder and its subsequent dramatisation as a stage play, we experience how two students strangle a colleague. A cocktail party follows and all the time the corpse lies in the chest on which the party buffet is offered. This piece of furniture is decorated almost like an altar, suggesting a black mass. The film's plot deals with the gradual discovery of the crime by a guest of the party, the mentor of the students who joins the party a little later. Without being aware of his role, he becomes the detective revealing the case and convicting the murderers. However, it also becomes evident that he is even more guilty than the murderers. Burdened by his negative war experience, this man was attracted to the Nietzschean idea of the superman, and this he communicated to the young students who followed him in a radical way. In this film, the clean and bright surface routines of everyday life seem to prevail. People live with the darkness lingering underneath and everywhere, unless they are made aware of it by sharper observation, made by a detective who at the same time (indirectly) is a murderer. At first sight, Strangers on a Train (1951) offers just a more than usually intricate and interesting crime case. During a train journey, a successful, socially upward- moving tennis champion is offered a deal by a fellow traveller, who is, as it turns out, the spoilt son of a millionaire. This traveller promises to rid the tennis player of his socially inadequate, vulgar, and promiscuous wife and, in return, expects to have his strict and repressive father 'removed.' In this way, there would be no clues as to who committed the crimes. However, when the psychological repercussions are thematized and especially when the tennis player's guiltless entanglement into guilt is intensified (although he ultimately gets off), we receive an impression of Hitchcock's interest in the Dark Romanticist notion of the abysses and the moral ambivalence of the human psyche. The point where all this starts are interpersonal relationships, especially between parents and children, which are supposed to be the foundation and heart of civilized society. In Rear Window (1954), a young, unmarried couple of fashionable journal photographers living in the rear building of a tenement block accidentally witnesses an incident in the front building that looks like a husband's murder of his wife. In consequence, the couple is drawn into a detective game while simultaneously going through a complicated phase in their relationship. The film is constituted by two overlying plots, one of what is generally called 'romantic love' and a 'crime and detection' plot. This combination is acted out as a subtle interaction between the events in the front building and the search activities in and from the rear house. The relatively bright relationship between a man and a woman in the (normally dark) rear house becomes intertwined with a dark relationship in the (normally bright) front building. When the case is resolved, the criminal arrested, a collateral knowledge effect remains: relationships between men and women are complex and dark. So, in the end, ironically (and humorously), the resolution of the love plot is at least suspended for the near future when the photographer breaks his other leg, too.

The topic of the darkness of the human psyche finds a comedy-like treatment in The Trouble With Harry (1955). When on a sunny autumn day in Vermont the corpse of a certain Harry, a man in his fifties, is found on a path in the forest, four people immediately feel guilty. They become aware of their dark side, as they have recently been violent towards Harry and may have caused his death. So, they decide to dispose of his corpse. But when Harry's shoes are found, the sheriff is called into action and Harry must be exhumed. To everybody's relief the coroner's examination reveals that Harry died of 'normal' heart failure. The second version of the film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), links the theme of human depravity with a case of ideological fanaticism and thematizes the evil of (implicit) structural repression (more about this film below in section 5). Probably Hitchcock's most famous film scene is the shocking and blood-curdling scene in Psycho (1960) when a young woman is stabbed while having a shower. Before directing this film, Hitchcock had worked four and a half years for US Television. This trained him in finding ways and means for breath-taking appeals to the audience despite the existing strict censorship rules. The murder as such is only shown in an indirect but highly suggestive way, i.e. as a sequence of metonymical pars pro toto shots (and also some metaphorical ones), alternating with in-between omissions to be completed by the viewer. Hitchcock's enormous repertoire of effects in this film caused a critic to make the statement: "Never before had any director so worked the emotions of the audience like stops on an organ console" (Rebello 2013, 162). The enactment of the murders does not restrict itself to effects. Throughout the film the search for the killer, their motive, and the question of guilt are intensified. But in the end, when the killer is found, this question is more or less suspended. Norman Bates, a young man who killed six people, is more or less innocent because of an abnormal, schizophrenic bondage to his mother. Such a way of becoming 'guilty' could happen to many people (a more extensive discussion of Psycho, see below in section 6). The central female character in The Birds (1963) – as indicated above – steps into a complex net of female characters rivalling for the attention of one man, the man she has fallen in love with. The final success of the heroine's perseverance is traced back to her management of the trauma caused when she was left by her mother in her childhood. Significantly, this appealing blonde is named Melanie, derived from ancient Greek 'melanos' (black) and a clue to her inner darkness. The darkness of the conflict between these women is effectfully transposed into the aggressive behaviour of a large flock of birds invading a picturesque coastal village. Apart from a more superficial link to a short story by Daphne du Maurier2, a most likely model for Hitchcock, a man highly versed in music, literature, and the arts, must have been Goya's famous series of aquatintas, called Caprichos (1797ff.) This applies especially to those works of art subtitled "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos" ('the sleep of reason produces monsters'), even if it depicts bats and winged vampires, not birds.3

2 Her tale is entitled "The Birds" and deals with a swarm of birds, gone astray under the influence of atomic radiation emitted by nuclear tests, that attacks human habitats (Du Maurier 1952). 3 Goya's etchings entitled Caprichos can be found (via Google) under 'Goya-Capricho-43jpg- Wikipedia' [accessed 26 November 2020].

A traumatized heroine is also at the centre of Marnie (1964). As in The Birds, she is played by blond and innocent-looking actress Tippi Hedren. The attractive secretary Marnie suffers from deep-set fears and is frigid. She compensates this by kleptomania. Nevertheless, her employer falls in love with her, marries her, and enforces sexual intercourse. Finally, after a series of confrontations, he finds out that she was witness to a murder at the age of five. This happened when her mother, a prostitute, killed one of her customers who had drunkenly tried to assault the child. In Hitchcock's penultimate film Frenzy (1972), several murders occur. Particularly direct and provocative is a scene when a woman is murdered by a pervert who is only able to reach sexual satisfaction by strangling his victim with his tie. Hitchcock indicates that the serial killer was mentally harmed through the relationship with his mother. The man is only found out when the inspector from Scotland Yard recognizes a direct parallel between the repressive care he experiences from his wife, especially her cooking experiments, and the impact of affections that destroy a personality: darkness as an everyday concomitant. Hitchcock's mode of presentation chooses its details with an eye to their effect, i.e. aesthetic appeal, innovation, surprise, provocation, and intensity. The theme of (abnormal) sexuality and serial killings is intended to be sensational and, to an extent, outrageous for the viewer. For Hitchcock, however, it is something basically human and dealing with it in fiction is salubrious. This is what he said in a speech after having received an award when confronted with the reproach that TV presents too much violence: [T]he point is that one of television's greatest contributions is that it brought murder back into the home where it belongs. Seeing a murder on television can be good therapy. It can help work off one's antagonism. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some. The real danger in my opinion is not violence. It is that the viewer of television murder can enjoy all the sensations without the mess. There are no stains to remove, no body to dispose of, no cement to dry. Such situation is not good for the national character. It encourages sloth and dries up creative juices. The result? Murder could someday be reduced to a mere spectator sport. (Hitchcock 1997, 58) What, then, connects Hitchcock with Dark Romanticism? He thematizes the unreliability of human perception, shows the impossibility of objectively differentiating between good and evil, has fundamental doubts about the moral abilities of man and suspends the traditional image of (middle-class) human respectability. Above all, he shares the aesthetic radicalism originating in that movement. Not only does he make use of the existing repertoire, but he also increases its effect on the viewer by means of psychological appeals and aesthetic complexity. The provocation of (romantic) darkness consists not so much in its topics, such as love, hate, and murder, but in its unfolding of the psychological abysses connected with those deeds and emotions via involvement of the viewer by aesthetic appeal. Hitchcock has set new standards in articulating this via the new filmic medium. What, then, is Romanticism and how did its elements, especially Dark Romanticism, come into existence?

3. Romanticism: Bright and Dark Romanticism – in the narrower sense it stretches from 1770 to 1830 – is a process caused by massive socio-historical changes (Brooks 1981; Mohr 1996a; Schmitz- Emans 2016). The changes include above all the rise of the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution. Sociologists register the change from a stratified, hierarchically organized society towards a functionally differentiated (and more democratic) society which then, in the second half of the 19th century, leads to a clearly modernized world (Lerner 1978). Early 18th-century Britain had, under the leadership of the dominant Whig gentry, orientated itself toward the world picture of Physico-Theology. This was a synthesis of Newton's physics (Law of gravitation, Opticks) and Locke's theory of knowledge in combination with secularized Protestantism (Latitudinarianism). The Whig gentry shared the conviction that one could experience empirically that underneath the surface of reality, principles of reason and mathematical formulas were at work. The world was considered a big mechanism, comparable to a clockwork. Tracing the latent rules of this reality and reshaping the lifeworld according to these hidden structures should make mankind the master of its history. In the end, this would lead to more authentic and perfect social conditions. This conviction and its implications found their first bold and catchy expression in the American Declaration of Independence with its ideas of the universal rights of man, the moral sovereignty of the individual, and the aim of an authentic egalitarian order of society. The eminent late 18th-century English philosopher William Godwin believed – together with the (progressive, revolutionary) British and French Jacobines – that once a larger community could be established which was dominantly founded on reason and the implicit organizing principle of nature, it would spread like wildfire and result in a better world. His magnum opus is the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793). It sums up the optimistic perspective of the Enlightenment as to the perfectibility of the human condition. But when the aftermath of the French Revolution had wronged many of his assumptions, he restricted his writings to novels because they were less narrow in terms of ideological messages and more open in taking into account the irrationality of human history. He had first-hand information on the French Revolution. His wife Mary Wollstonecraft had directly participated in the events and was an ardent propagator of the rights of women. Their daughter was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). As we all know, that novel centres around Dr. Frankenstein and his creation of an artificial man. Mary Shelley argues that the expectation of a better world through the progress of science and civilization is bound to founder as long as people (like the Enlightenment theorists) believed in the workings of objectified reason and benevolence but ignored the significance of domestic affections as a model for society in general. The failure of the French Revolution put an end to Enlightenment optimism, making human history appear inscrutable and irrational. Especially the period between 1795 and 1815, frequently referred to as High Romanticism, shows a dramatic loss of confidence in the collective power of the middle-class individual who had seen himself as the maker of history and had even continued this for a while by following Napoleon, an allegedly sublime leader. For many, the mentality that came to

prevail was close to desperation. This was, in fact, the period when Goya created his Caprichos, deploring the rise of irrationalism. All this found wide-spread expression through the narrative poems and the character types created and lived by Lord Byron and his successors. The Byronic hero (Thorslev 1962; Hoffmeister 1983) in his promethean thirst for knowledge and the making of a better world finds himself unjustly discarded by the Creator, by fate or by an indifferent natural history – like Lucifer, Cain or the character of Manfred. Godwin's novels have such protagonists. A satirical novel like Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818) shows the situation of High Romanticism as a kind of madhouse: desperate idealists rage against heaven, others become cynics, even nihilists, or conservative sceptics, some concentrate on building picturesque landscape gardens, and some withdraw to a naive and humble Christian belief inspired by their notion of an ideal middle age.4

4. The Aesthetics of Romanticism Over the course of the 18th century, the middle class gained in economic and political power. Thus, it became a social and cultural necessity to consider and acknowledge its social outlook which was shaped by rural tradition, folklore, and puritanism. Such recognition happened by modifying the existing Physico-Theology by (1) irrationalizing, (2) historicizing, and (3) aestheticizing it. The matrix for this extension was provided by the aesthetic of the Sublime – as Edmund Burke had described it on the basis of Locke's associationist and psychological theory of knowledge in his highly influential A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The Sublime is defined through its effect of aweful terror caused by the experience of darkness, power, fear, emptiness, vacuity, loneliness, silence, vastness, infinity, largeness, brightness, suddenness, loudness, and painfulness. The common denominator of these phenomena is the implication of an immediate threat to life. Perceptions of sublime phenomena first cause a kind of fear or terror in the observer which then is followed by a feeling of liberation and a heightened self- awareness (Mohr 1996b, esp. 289-295). Beauty is experienced in objects characterized by smallness, roundness, soft variation, restraint, delicacy in form and colour, and smoothness. Over the course of the 18th century, when landscape and historical buildings embedded in landscape (and landscape gardens) became privileged objects of the experience of nature, such 'beauty' was bracketed under the category of 'the Picturesque' which was used for paintings in British art criticism since 1685 (Mohr 1996a, 244). The Picturesque (and Beautiful) came to stand for the bright, the Sublime for the dark side of Romanticism. The (double) aesthetic of the Picturesque and especially of the Sublime no longer followed a strict canon of (classical) rules inherited from antiquity and recovered during the Renaissance, but it was an aesthetic of psychological effect. To understand and practise it, no complex knowledge acquired by higher education was necessary. It was accessible to every (merely literate) person endowed with reason and feeling, or rather

4 A text very similar in attitude to T.L. Peacock in German Romanticism is Nachtwachen, written by August Klingemann under the pseudonym 'Bonaventura.' German literary history has yet to recognize this and account for it adequately (Bonaventura 1968).

'sense and sensibility.'5 This aesthetic provided a new freedom for artistic expression, across and beyond the existing genres as well as media – and social classes. Poetry (lyrics) becomes painterly and musical, prose can become lyrical, paintings, architecture, and landscape gardens convey sentiments and moods etc. The new creative freedom allows selective borrowing and a recycling of the art(s) of the past and their styles: Greek and Roman classicism, the Gothic, the Celtic heritage, Medievalism, Oriental and Chinese arts, European and local folklore. Ideally all art aspires to the condition of music which seems the most intense way of allowing humans a transcendental (often sublime) aesthetic experience via their faculties of perception. Over the course of the 19th century, this leads to Richard Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk with its intention of a multidimensional and multimedial realization of artistic expression. Wieland Wagner, a grandson of the poet, composer, and theatrical innovator as well as himself an opera director of international repute, said in 1968 that nowadays Richard Wagner would work in Hollywood (Goléa 1968, 90). In fact, already towards the end of the 18th century, forerunners of the cinema were developed: like Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophysikon in London and, around 30 years later, Robert Barker's Panorama in Edinburgh. After the invention of photography in the mid-19th century, the cinema was created in Paris in 1895 by the brothers Lumière, contemporaneously with the brothers Skladanovsky in Berlin and Edison in the USA. Looking for the first aesthetic articulations of High Romanticism and the development of its dark side in British culture, one must go back to the novel The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (Guthke 1958, 11-140). At the age of nineteen, during a longer stay as a diplomat in Germany, Lewis got to know recent literature that, according to English standards, was blood-soaked and obscene – and he was fascinated. Germany, at that time, was split up into many feudal territories of limited size, but its emerging middle class was in search of a national cultural union. Especially in the protestant parts of Middle and Northern Germany folkloristic literature was collected and published. For example, several volumes of Volksmärchen der Deutschen [German folktales] by Karl August Musäus, Benedikte Naubert, and Johann Mathias Müller. From these collections, novels such as Abällino der Große Bandit (1794) by Heinrich Zschokke6 or Das Petermännchen. Eine Geistergeschichte aus dem 13. Jahrhundert (1791) by Christian Heinrich Spieß took themes and motifs to entertain an emerging, only recently literate, mass reading audience (Mohr 2009a). Lewis's fascination did not come from nothing. In Britain, a genre named 'Gothic Novel' had existed for about 30 years, which Lewis then continued with new inspiration. The term 'gothic' at that time implied a negative view of medieval, North European art. Dating back to 17th-century Italian art theoreticians Vasari and Palladio, it had the meaning of 'medieval,' 'brutal,' 'uncouth,' or 'barbaric.' After Lewis, the meanings 'sexually suggestive' or 'obscene' were added. During the 19th century, the Gothic style came to be associated with the authentic liberal traditions of Northern

5 Significantly, this is the title of one of the best-known novels of Jane Austen (publ. 1811, begun in 1795). 6 This novel was translated into English by M.G. Lewis under the title The Bravo of Venice (1805).

Europe, as opposed to Catholic repression, superstition, and backwardness of the Southern countries (Mohr 1990). The first person to use the term in connection with novels had been Horace Walpole on the title page of the second edition of his The Castle of Otranto (1765). Walpole, a man at the centre of political and salon life in London (Mohr 2013), cherished a radical aesthetic (based on an ironic approach) with a preference for the gothic, medieval, barbaric inventory unusual for his age, which favoured a neoclassicism in conformity with Physico-Theology. Walpole was the first one to move towards the irrationalization, historization and aestheticization of this world view, foreseeing that this was necessary in response to the outlook of the emerging middle classes and the changing society. Nevertheless, for the next 30 years after Walpole, the term 'Gothic' was used by mainly female middle- class writers in the sense of presenting narratives that transposed the topics of the Novels of Sensibility back to the Middle Ages in order to show the present age of the reader as the outcome of the workings of a benevolent history. With Lewis, a shocking radical aesthetic was introduced together with a critique of enlightenment convictions as well as of 'sensibility.' In this way, the literary character of a monk who, despite his strong religious beliefs and high moral convictions, becomes a sexual offender and murderer, could serve to convey the experience of the collapse of the optimistic individual of the Enlightenment. The 18th century, especially the (middle-class) cult of sensibility, had argued against (aristocratic) libertinism and its conviction that man was unable to follow reason and was driven by egotistical sensual gratification. Mainstream literature pleaded for a world constituted by reason and benevolence. A character like the monk demonstrated that this was no longer applicable. Supported by the aesthetic of terror (which is part of the Sublime), a new model of reality could be made plausible that assumed that the world and mankind are under the rule of an inscrutable, irrational natural history. In The Monk, man is subject to occult processes and forces. There is no certainty that man participates in higher moral inspiration. All that remains are his organs of perception and his dependence on sensual experience. Only they connect him with what is to be considered as real. Even if they provide him with intensive information this cannot be objectified. They are unreliable and subject to deception. An accurate differentiation between guilt and innocence is impossible – he is morally incapacitated. After 1800, the Gothic Novel as a genre became mass-produced literature, providing a few outstanding examples but also a plethora of shockers and standardized emotions for less sophisticated readers. All in all, the Gothic Novel created a set of elements that have fertilized all novelistic genres ever since, including crime novels, scary movies, splatter, vampire films and the works of Stephen King. It is no coincidence that the experience of High Romanticism, its insult to man's moral pride, coincides with the modern empirical concern with the abysses of the human psyche. From that time on, the cultural historian Morse Peckham observes, there is an increasing tendency to understand the human personality in terms of the surrounding culture and society, outgrowing simple ideas of innate evil and superstition (Peckham 1962, esp. 279-287). The new notion of the human personality insists upon an increasing knowledge of what we do not yet know about the disposition of man. Peckham speaks of tracing human 'otherness' in an empirical and aesthetic way. Such

an aesthetic frequently follows the paths lined out by the Sublime: first the experience of terror, then the experience of liberation. In the era of Romanticism this otherness correlated with fear and terror orientates itself toward historical material, interpreted in the context of an irrational natural history. Around the middle of the 19th century, Realism as a conceptual movement originates when an increasing number of artists discard the interest in history as it reveals no objectifiable meaning and consequently turn to contemporary life.7 Now, not only an inscrutable natural history is considered to determine human life but also complex economic and cultural conditions created by mankind that alienate man from himself and from an authentic life. With reference to Hegel, Peckham contends that, since Romanticism, man is only able to define and assert himself by permanently assuring himself of the (dark) 'other.' Dark Romanticism has triggered a process of differentiating self-experience by experience of 'otherness.' This corresponded with the needs of a growing (reading) public. Hordes of (alienated) artists emerged to take care of this and there were no limitations to their work except (a) the possibilities of artistic representation, (b) the degree to which it is individually acceptable, and (c) socially admissible. But frequently – and fortunately – they did not care about such restrictions.

5. Assessing Hitchcock's Attitude These conditions seem to apply also to Hitchcock's presentation of murders and (perverted) murderers in the picture/language/sound combination of filmic expression. Underlying a film is the plot, the dramatic and causal line that structures the action. It also sends identificational appeals to the recipient to make him, with his fore- knowledge and psychology, participate in the action of the characters. In this way, the experience of 'otherness' provides the recipient with a more differentiated understanding of himself. A fundamental component of Hitchcock's presentation – as it has been indicated above – is the question of guilt and/or innocence against the background of complex and contingent social conditions. He often demonstrates that these two categories are often blurred and generally beyond the reach of man's objective judgment. With Hitchcock, this situation has almost taken on a 'postmodernist' and 'deconstructive' quality. The aim of such deconstruction is to relativize what exists, to look at it in terms of alternatives and to approach it from a position of freedom, creativity, and superiority. Let us look at Jonathan Culler's definition: Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical opposites that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, form/meaning. To deconstruct an opposition is to show that it is not natural and inevitable but a construction, produced by the discourses that rely on it. (Culler 1997, 126) Hitchcock does not go that far. He feels no need to completely dissolve such opposites, although his aims are quite similar. He is not as highly experimental, and he does not strive for an alternative construction of the world. However, he engages the viewer

7 The term 'realism' was first used in 1851 to denounce Gustave Courbet's paintings which denied a meaningful metaphysical force behind the workings of natural history (cf. Nochlin 1971, 23-56).

effectively, plausibly, and achieves deep insights. He points at the notions of guilt/innocence on the one hand and the lifeworld on the other, and then exposes this discrepancy with his dark humour.

6. Hitchcock's Darkness, Irony, and Humour Hitchcock has compared film, especially television, with the invention of indoor plumbing. Fundamentally, it has brought no change in the public's habits, but it eliminated the necessity of acting them out in the open, with all the risks to the community (Gottlieb 1997, 57). He adds: "I have been making light of murder but I hope I never forget that it can be a sordid business – especially if you don't have a good lawyer" (Gottlieb 1997, 58). Evidently there is a lot of irony behind Hitchcock's aesthetic. Not surprisingly, he refers to Thomas de Quincey's "[...] delightful essay Murder As One of the Fine Arts from 1827" (ibid.). Incidentally, shortly after writing this essay, de Quincey translated a German Gothic novel into English (Walladmor) and, a few years later, he wrote a novel in that style (Klosterheim, 1832). This shows how to overcome romantic darkness and desperation: via irony and aestheticism. Such irony became Hitchcock's tool.8 Murder is his material for practicing an irony that refuses the helpless acceptance of the (implicitly dark) human condition. And irony is the solvent for all such unpleasantness, and it is frequently accompanied by black humour. In his earlier works there are subtle hints of irony and humour, most evident in the 'cameos,' i.e. short and marginal, ironic as well as humorous appearances of Hitchcock in personam in his films. The above-mentioned Blackmail (1929), for example, is his tenth film and it contains the second cameo. Over the years, he developed them into distinct relativizations of the given film.9 The second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is, according to Truffaut and Hitchcock, an important step towards his professionalization. 10 This concerns, on the one hand, the plausibility of the plot and its pictorial realization. On the other hand, Hitchcock moved away from blatant crime and cold irony to longer phases of black/dark humour. In said film, the dangers of exotic Marrakech are cushioned by humoristic elements. On a bus ride, Hank, the ten-year-old son of the American McKenna family, accidentally tears away an Arab woman's veil, which leads to a dangerous scuffle. A Frenchman, M. Bernard, calms down the situation. Hank thanks him and invites him into his family's garden in America. As a Frenchman, he would surely feel at home there in view of the many snails he would find to eat. Soon afterwards, M. Bernard is stabbed. Dying in McKenna's arms he communicates to him diffuse but alarming information. In a restaurant, the McKennas meet a mysterious British couple who soon after kidnap Hank. For the moment, however, McKenna – in slapstick fashion but also serving as a premonition – has trouble with the deep

8 These and the following arguments coincide to an extent with those in Allen (2007). My approach is less detailed overall but possibly more concrete about the role of black humour and I contradict Allen's equation of Hitchcock's attitude and postmodernism (258-259). 9 A complete list of these cameos can be found in Harris and Lasky (1976, 256). 10 Truffaut (1978, 94). The first version from 1934 was in many respects inconsistent, though its mix of themes and styles sufficed to attract a fairly large audience.

Moroccan upholstery that (ambivalently) clutches but also catapults its user. At the end of the film when McKenna has recovered Hank by risking both of their lives, he apologizes to his rich, childless, bored, and boring American friends who had fallen asleep in the meantime waiting: "I’m sorry, we had gone to […] pick up Hank" (01:54:24). Shortly before, he, together with his wife, saved the British Prime Minister in the Royal Albert Hall from – as it is suggested – religious fanatics and/or communist assassins. The shot from the killer's gun was intended to coincide with the clash of the cymbals in the orchestra. But Mrs. McKenna's shriek just at this moment distracts the killer and the Prime Minister is only slightly injured. The sound, signal for the crime and at the same time its camouflage, is neutralized by the heroine's heart-felt utterance. Three sounds, an evil one (the shot), a good one (the shriek), and an aesthetic one (the orchestra) are typical constituents of a multivalent reality. Such a sense of reality with its normal (bright) as well as dark meanings is held together by irony. These three components were already implied in the message that the dying M. Bernard had whispered to McKenna. McKenna thinks that the information 'Ambrose Cha(p)e(l)' refers to the name of the London mastermind of the planned assassination. And, indeed, he finds a taxidermist of that name. This man rejects him brutally, but what he hides has obviously nothing to do with the attempt. So, McKenna's wife has the idea to look for a St. Ambrose Chapel. When they get there, the assassins are just engaged in singing a cheerless, depressive hymn – an ironic commentary by Hitchcock that Church Father St. Ambrose (ambivalently) did not only do good when he introduced the singing of hymns into religious service. But Chappell is also the name of the most important manufacturer of upright pianos and publisher of musical scores in Britain during the 19th and 20th century. In other words, the name Chappell could frequently be found in the living rooms of the middle class, mostly in connection with obligatory and often involuntary musical education. No wonder that this is also the name Hitchcock gives to a man who earns his living by stuffing animals. Chappell, the piano manufacturer, also had a nationwide reputation as a model entrepreneur and he was one of the co-directors of the Royal Albert Hall. This, then, is the location of the showdown. The people who are the cause of darkness and evil in this film all use the 'camouflage' of respectability: on the one hand, aggressive ideological fanatics, and the quietly oppressive establishment on the other. This is a plea for an open, multivalent, unaffected lifestyle that accepts the multivalence of reality and corresponds with what is the essence of humour and irony, namely creative vitality. Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock's next film,11 is based upon a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, two authors of crime stories, well-known for their surprise endings.12 In Vertigo, this surprise comes about when the perceptions of the central character (Scottie), with whom the viewer identifies, are misled. Both writers came to Hitchcock's attention through Henri-Georges Clouzot's film Les Diaboliques (1955), which is based on one of their novels (Rebello 2013, 20-22). There, a woman tries to murder her husband, and her friend helps her. In the end, however, it turns out that this friend is

11 I skip The Wrong Man (1956), a sinister, suspenseful black and white film about a man wrongly accused like Kafka's Joseph K. But after all, it is a fast-made b/w TV production. 12 The novel is entitled D'Entre les Morts (Boileau and Narcejac 1954). The most subtle analysis of this film is a monograph by Barr (2012).

the husband's mistress and that all this is a (fortunately unsuccessful) trick to kill the woman. Boileau and Narcejac were inspired by the experimental texts of the Nouveau Roman that thematise the fundamental gap between the reality constructions of human perception and an external reality that eludes authentic representation. This appealed to Hitchcock in his concern with the unreliability and projecting character of human perception. Scottie Ferguson, the protagonist of Vertigo is a retired detective. He quit his job because of a fear of heights (accompanied by vertigo) due to feelings of guilt after a colleague had been killed in a police action. A former classmate hires him to observe his wife Madeleine, who behaves strangely and is attracted in a magical way to her dead great-grandmother Carlotta. On one occasion, Scottie saves her from drowning herself near the Golden Gate Bridge. After a while, he falls in love with Madeleine. She becomes the object of his romantic phantasies and projections, effectively underscored by music in the style of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. When Madeleine follows the traces of Carlotta and climbs the tower of a Spanish mission building, Scottie is unable to follow because of his fear of heights. Immediately afterwards, the woman jumps off the tower. Scottie's guilt complex increases. As a therapy, he revisits the old locations and encounters a woman who looks just like the deceased Madeleine but calls herself Judy. He talks to her, meets her several times, and falls in love with her, as he sees Madeleine in her. But when one day Judy wears Madeleine's necklace, it dawns on him that this is the woman he had to observe to make possible the killing of the real Madeleine. Judy had been hired to pose for Scottie as the suicidally inclined Madeleine and she did so until she absconded a few seconds before the death of the real Madeleine. Thus Scottie testified that Madeleine’s deadly leap from a tower was a suicide although she had been pushed by her husband. To make Judy confess and, at the same time, conquer his fear of heights, Scottie takes her up the monastery tower and declares his love to her (as 'Madeleine'). Suddenly a nun steps out of the dark, Judy is terrified and falls off the tower. As in the other films, for Hitchcock, crime is of somewhat secondary importance. That is why he changes the course of action from the novel so that the murderous intrigue is revealed some time before the end – so the viewer can follow Scottie's problem of multiple disorientation, in addition to his guilt complex and vertigo. This is an offer to the viewer to reflect on the irony of Scottie's actions. Again, Hitchcock thematizes the unreliability of perception, its projective strategies, especially in love matters, the irrationality and dark dimensions of relationships, the inseparability of guilt and innocence – all elements from the repertoire of Romanticism. The title of North by Northwest (1959) implicitly already addresses the theme of the unreliability of perceptions and of an inscrutable fate. These lines were chosen from a self-characterization made by Hamlet to his former fellow students Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern: "I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (Hamlet, Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 405-407). Hamlet implies that he is only slightly mad, it is the circumstances that are genuinely mad. This is what applies to Roger O. Thornhill (initials ROT!) – the main character. Suddenly the boring life of a man in the advertising business, twice deserted by his wives, becomes complex and exciting. The first clue to his situation appears when he finds out that some secret agents mistake him for an important man named Kaplan who is evidently entangled in secret

networks. Thornhill must find that person to come to grips with his life. The viewer, however, learns that Mr. Kaplan is a non-existent spy, made up as cover for a real one. This enables the viewer to observe and judge Thornhill's desperate activities from a superior position. An attractive woman offers Thornhill to lure the police on a false track and arranges an encounter with Mr. Kaplan. Meeting with a Kaplan (curate) sounds like an appointment with a father confessor that should be honoured by forgiveness and absolution. But instead (or because) of a clergyman or monk, evil awaits Thornhill. This happens in the famous cropduster scene, the tryst on a cornfield at noon where Thornfield finds himself chased and gunned at by a cropduster plane. He has a hairbreadth escape because the plane collides with a tanker in a spectacular explosion. This three-minute episode, the midpoint of the film, is a clue to the film's essence. It is an inversion of the most typical scene of the film noir genre (cf. Mohr 2009b; Naremore 1998). In those films, a (male) character is asked to come to a derelict and dimly lit city quarter in darkness and rain, frequently at midnight. Instead of receiving helpful information, he meets with dark cars and sinister persons shooting at him from several angles. This is what we get in the cropduster scene, in full daylight, however. This scene is the bright (in a way picturesque) variant of a film noir staple. A man with a slouch hat and an aquiline nose, whom Hitchcock makes briefly appear, is a reminder of the original noir scenario. This link to the scene's hidden implication is also a hint at the film's ancestry. Film noir descended from filmic expressionism and that movement was the inheritor of Dark Romanticism. As in most Hitchcock films, irony and (black) humour relativize the inevitable and the brutal facts. The irony (and humour) of the final scenes probably leaves the strongest impression. Thornhill and the female agent (who is now more 'loyal' to him) escape from an absurd and funny chase down across the monumental faces of the American presidents hewn in stone in South Dakota. When in safety, they are shown climbing up together into a sleepingcar berth, just when the train is about to enter a tunnel. They start – understandingly and smilingly accepted by the viewers – their common trip into the dark tunnel of sexuality and marriage. Hitchcock's most successful film is Psycho (1960). It is also his most shocking and deeply ironic film. Sam Loomis cannot marry his love Marion Crane because of the debts that burden the business inherited from his father and because of the alimony he must pay to his ex-wife. Given the opportunity, Marion embezzles $40,000 from her employer's office, to flee from Arizona to Sam in California. Shortly before her destination, she gets lost and decides to stay overnight at a motel. She is welcomed and given a meal by Norman Bates, a young man who looks very similar to her lover. His conversation impresses her, and she decides to take the money back the next day. During the conversation Norman is presented as if birds of prey were perched on his head: a stuffed eagle owl and a raven are hanging on the wall behind him (Psycho 00:39:00 – 00:44:00). This is a reference to Goya's Caprichos. At night, when taking a shower, Marion is stabbed by a shadowy female person. A private investigator in search of the lost money can trace Marion's flight up to the motel but is also stabbed by this person. Now Lila, Marion's sister, and Sam Loomis start their search and ultimately convict Norman Bates. He is schizophrenic and has a mother fixation. When his mother looked for a partner, he killed both and mummified her body. Whenever he was attracted to a woman, the motherly self in him induced him to dress up as Mother and

kill the woman: murder as a warped outcome of motherly affection. This is paradoxical, unsettling, and deeply ironic. In this way, Norman had killed two more female tourists before he stabbed Marion and the insurance detective. Norman's victims were, above all, women who had loved too much, like his mother Norma and Marion Crane. The film's plot shows several ruptures (cf. Mohr 2017). Marion, who is introduced as the heroine (and played by marquee star Janet Leigh), is murdered before the middle of the film. The detective who enters half-way through the film is murdered shortly after. The case is solved by a more marginal, unemotional figure, Marion's sister Lila, and by Sam, Marion's lover, whose reluctance made Marion turn into a criminal. Thus, it cannot be a coincidence that Hitchcock makes Sam, who helps solve the case, and Norman, the serial killer, look like identical twins (cf. Psycho 01:28:00; 01:39:00). Who is the protagonist? Sam, the not completely innocent rescuer, or Norman, the insane, quasi innocent, killer? In fact, Hitchcock attaches some importance to making Norman appear innocent: when Lila searches Norman's room, she finds a shellac record playing music from the second movement of Beethoven's Eroica (cf. Psycho, 01:38:00) It is the marcia funebre ('funeral march'), which Beethoven had originally dedicated in admiration to Napoleon, but later declared to be a mournful statement on a corrupt tyrant. Norman as a fallen hero not only stands in the tradition of Napoleon, a contemporary of Romanticism and for many a ('sublime') maker of a better world, perfecting an enlightened history, but also, for an increasing number, in a continuity with the destructive monk of M.G. Lewis and his Byronesque successors. In addition, the action of Psycho disappoints the viewer's expectation of a regular plot with a protagonist and an antagonist. Its relevant characters show incomplete or deformed lifelines. The concept of guilt as well as the notion of an individual identity that can act rationally and morally seems inadequate. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned Hitchcock's merits in developing the language of filmic expression. Regarding Dark Romanticism, a special element of Psycho must be addressed: the Bates's sinister big house. Already in Rebecca, the whole complex of psychological burdens and stress found symbolic expression in Manderley, Maxim de Winter's castle. This follows the tradition of the Gothic Novel – as e.g. outlined in Railo's The Haunted Castle. Already the first example of this genre, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from 1764, has at its centre a monumental building, burdened by a history of feudal crimes and bloodshed. Its dark interior, intricate corridors and passages correspond to the evil psychological states of its inhabitants. A further impressive variant of such a building is Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher. Its decay and a deep fissure in its front correlate with the irrationalism and decadence of its inhabitants. When at the end of their tales, the castle of Otranto, the House of Usher, and also Manderley explode, collapse, or go up in smoke, this signals deliverance, redemption, and freedom for the survivors. Although Hitchcock made the motel the scene of crime, he knew his film needed a more sophisticated and more threatening edifice to create a pictorial equivalent to the psychological darkness behind the murders. So, the house of the Bates is situated threateningly on the slope behind the motel and it is built in the sinister cluttered style of Late Romanticism (1890s ff.). Hitchcock identified it as 'California Gothic' and 'California gingerbread' (Rebello 2013, 69; Ackroyd 2016, 198).

Figure 2: The house of the Bates in Psycho (00:50:00). From outside, the house at night looks like a skull, a parallel to Mother's mummified head (and body) inside. This building with its decorative overload outside is even more darkly romantic inside. It has a stifling interior and a dark, moist, and musty cellar. Seeing all this causes terror in the spectator and, considering the appeal and effect on the human body with its vulnerability (blood, injury, pain): horror. Especially in Mother's bedroom, dark psyche and terrifying/horrifying aspects of the human body intersect. The mattress shows the deep impression of her body. This detail was surely suggested by William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" (Faulkner 1942). There, it turns out at the end that an aristocratic woman, a remnant of the Old South, killed her 'carpetbagger' lover (a profiteer from the North) when he wanted to leave her and that she has slept for years beside the corpse which is found lying in the attitude of an embrace. In his works, Faulkner has investigated the Old American South with its legacy of slavery and has revealed the violence and crime behind the classicist façade of erudition and feudal pretensions to grandeur. The tradition of the Southern Gothic connects Faulkner with the Dark Romanticism of E.A. Poe – just as the raven does in Hitchcock's case.

Figure 3: The impression left by Norma's body in her bed, years after her death (Psycho 01:36:00- 01:37:00). Unlike its haunted predecessors, the house of the Bates does not go up in smoke. This makes sense, however, because neither is Norman 'really' guilty nor would such a fire eliminate the continuing darkness implicit in everyday life. Psycho is pervaded by deep irony, almost without humour, however. This may have to do with the fact that the film was shot in only four weeks at the unusually low budget of $807,000 (Rebello 2013, 156). And, of course, it would be difficult to combine

humour with such a sequence of shocking scenes. Psycho must be seen as a singular extension of Hitchcock's experience as director of serials on American TV. A different case is Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's penultimate film, produced after his return to England. It pays homage to his home country and revels in dark (and British) humour. Already in the picturesque opening scene with a panoramic aerial shot of the Thames in London, a ship with a massively smoking funnel crosses and blackens the screen. Shortly after, just when a politician holds a speech on the Victoria Embankment close to Westminster Palace, promising a river free from industrial pollution, a naked female corpse strangled with a tie drifts ashore. Such irony verging on black humour is continued. The presentation of officials, politicians, and policemen shows a subtle tendency towards caricature. Elderly women, like the necktie murderer's mother or the investigating inspector's wife, appear affectionate but stifling. There is slapstick, illustrating the contradictions and ambivalence of existence: a corpse the killer wants to dispose of in a sack of potatoes resists despite its stiffness – it is 'kicking though not alive,' contrary to the idiomatic expression. The hair of the necktie killer, Mr. Rusk, has the orange colour of rusk. And could not a slice of rusk be deadly if it got stuck in the throat? At the end of the film a man wrongly imprisoned for the necktie murders named Blaney (cf. 'blame me') escapes from prison to revenge himself on Rusk, the real murderer. He gets into his house and slays him in his bed with an old starter crank. Thereupon we hear a repetitive knocking sound as if from an old car engine. However, it is the wheels of a luggage trolley Rusk carries upstairs to dispose of the strangled female corpse in his bed. Actually, Blaney has not smashed Rusk's head but the head of a woman Rusk has murdered and left in his bed. At that moment, we hear the Scotland Yard inspector's voice in the background: "Mr. Rusk, you are not wearing your tie!" (01:50:16). This sounds as if a simple violation of the dress-code would be much more of a crime than a murder. Such a cool and humorous distortion of the facts allows to walk over the depths of life. Its darkness is bearable if we can counter it with playful irony. It need not be underlined that these elements were not in the original novel, but in the script 'generated' by Hitchcock, the auteur. An even more humorous, almost unrealistic, and farcical world is presented in Hitchcock's last film Family Plot (1976), which returns to the rural USA. In a way, the film reproduces the mad situation from North by Northwest. This surely has to do with the fact that it was yet again Ernest Lehmann who wrote the script – using the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning and subordinating himself to Hitchcock, the auteur. During the film we realize that its action plays with the double meaning of its title, (a) family grave and (b) intrigue among family members. The novel's characters are a bunch of greedy and dissatisfied people, interacting under false names and pretences, taking advantage of each other, even robbing and killing. A young woman, Blanche Tyler, who poses as a spiritistic medium, sees a chance to relieve the elderly Mrs. Rainbird of a considerable sum, should she be able to find the lady's nephew whom she once discarded as illegitimate. Now Mrs. Rainbird needs him as her legal heir. Thanks to his criminal energy the nephew does not need the money and prefers to carry on undisturbed with his activities. He runs a jeweller's shop as a camouflage for selling the jewels he 'acquires' by blackmailing and/or kidnapping rich persons. The investigations made by Blanche and her friend George, a jobless actor, interfere with the nephew's designs and he strikes back. But his plans to kill them fail and Blanche

and George manage – thanks to their wit and good luck, irrespective of the question of guilt – to escape and deliver the nephew to the police. Their relief increases when they discover that some of the blackmailed jewels are hidden among the crystals in the chandelier. Critics call Family Plot a comedy of cunning and deceit (Hahn 1999, 258). The action occurs in a humorous setting of many unexpected surprises. Its ironies make it transparent for an underlying dark reality where guilt and innocence are inseparably intertwined. It appears that at the end of his career, Hitchcock was particularly adroit in articulating the (romanticist) darkness which had challenged his creativity all his life. Even as we look at the image showing Hitchcock with the raven/crow, we realize: this bird is not the correlative of a desperate psyche like the bats and vampires on Goya's acquatinto. Hitchcock and the black messenger of evil are separated by an ironical distance, the film director plays with darkness: humor vincit tenebras.13

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13 My variation on Virgil's "Amor vincit omnia[...]" (Bucolica 10.69, Vergil 2001).

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Films Clouzot, Henri-Georges, director. Les Diaboliques. 1955. TF1 Video, 2000. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Blackmail. 1929. DVD. Studio Canal / Arthaus, 2009. [silent as well as sound version] Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Family Plot. 1976. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Frenzy. 1972. DVD. Universal Studios, 2010. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Marnie. 1964. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. North by Northwest. 1959. DVD. Turner and Warner Entertainment, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Psycho. 1960. DVD. Universal Studios, 2003. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Rear Window. 1954. DVD. Universal Studios, 2006. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Rebecca. 1940. DVD. Euro Video Imagion AG, 2008. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Rope. 1948. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Shadow of a Doubt. 1942. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Strangers on a Train. 1951. DVD. Turner and Warner, 2004. [Hitchcock Collection] Hitchcock, Alfred, director. The Birds. 1963. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. The Lodger. 1926. DVD: Screen Gems Aberle Media, 2012. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1). 1934. DVD. Network Gaumont, 2008. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. The Man Who Knew Too Much (2). 1956. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. The Trouble with Harry. 1955. DVD. Universal Studios, 2001. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. The Wrong Man. 1956. DVD. Turner and Warner, 2004. [Hitchcock Collection] Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Vertigo. 1958. DVD. Universal Studios, 2006. Wiene, Robert, director. Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari. 1919. Eureka Video, 2000.