McKittrick, Casey. "The pleasures and pangs of Hitchcockian consumption." Hitchcock’s Appetites: The corpulent plots of desire and dread. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 65–99. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501311642.0007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 16:41 UTC. Copyright © Casey McKittrick 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 The pleasures and pangs of Hitchcockian consumption People say, “ Why don ’ t you make more costume pictures? ” Nobody in a costume picture ever goes to the toilet. That means, it ’ s not possible to get any detail into it. People say, “ Why don ’ t you make a western? ” My answer is, I don ’ t know how much a loaf of bread costs in a western. I ’ ve never seen anybody buy chaps or being measured or buying a 10 gallon hat. This is sometimes where the drama comes from for me. 1 y 1942, Hitchcock had acquired his legendary moniker the “ Master of BSuspense. ” The nickname proved more accurate and durable than the title David O. Selznick had tried to confer on him— “ the Master of Melodrama ” — a year earlier, after Rebecca ’ s release. In a fi fty-four-feature career, he deviated only occasionally from his tried and true suspense fi lm, with the exceptions of his early British assignments, the horror fi lms Psycho and The Birds , the splendid, darkly comic The Trouble with Harry , and the romantic comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith of 1941, which he is said to have made purely out of loyalty to friend Carole Lombard. When asked why he did not branch out into other genres, Hitchcock generally replied with some variation on the reply he gave Fletcher Markle above on his TV show Telescope . The elliptical explanation he was known to offer — “ Nobody in a costume picture ever goes to the toilet, ” and “ I don ’ t know how much a loaf of bread costs in a western ” — should tell us several things. First, it points to a particular ethos of verisimilitude in representation for which critics have applauded HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 6655 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:142:41:14 66 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES him throughout his fi lm career — his careful attention to detail within the mise-en-scene of his fi lms. Hitchcock assiduously avoided anachronism, left nothing extraneous, nothing without visual explanatory power, in his frame, and was wholly and consistently devoted to a realism that governed the life of objects and people in his fi lms. It points to Hitchcock ’ s need to know the ins and outs of the material world of his fi lm, including the small transactions, before he could begin to realize a drama within it. It is also quite telling that Hitchcock (repeatedly) offered the examples that he did. His microscopic focus on human habits, behaviors, and obligations such as going to the toilet and buying bread are, for him, benchmarks of that commitment to realism. They reveal his belief in grounding his cinema in the banal, the quotidian, the material realities and exchanges of human existence that often receive representational short shrift in the cinema of other directors. These small moments of transaction, he says, are “ sometimes where the drama comes from. ” Of course, food and drink were incredibly important both in the director’ s own personal life, as well as in his motion pictures. Food was not just sustenance for Hitchcock; it was inspiration, fantasy, a window to sublimity. As he once told a reporter in New York, “ There is as much anticipation in confronting good food as there is in going on a holiday or seeing a good show. There are two kinds of eating — eating to sustain and eating for pleasure. I eat for pleasure. ” When Hitchcock hired new actors and writers for his productions, he most often used conversations about food and drink to break the ice with them, whether it was how to prepare batter pudding with Frenzy ’ s Anna Massey; how to fi nd good wine in Bristol, with (twelve-year-old) Veronica Cartwright of The Birds ; how donuts are made, with Tippi Hedren; or how to make pork cracklings, with writer David Freeman. For Hitchcock, friendship bonding happened over food and drink. A sure sign of his acceptance was an invitation to his always plentiful dinner table. In what follows, I explore the various ends to which Hitchcock deployed food and drink beyond the sustenance of a realist aesthetic. Specifi cally, I locate moments when he grounds food and drink in philosophical inquiries about the relationship between pleasure and disgust (the polarized ambivalence which characterized his own consumption of food and drink); further, I examine his use of processes of consumption and elimination to dramatize sublimation, particularly sexual sublimation; to explore the nature of his characters ’ vulnerabilities; to metaphorize the narrative fl ow of information and the nature of his characters ’ interactions; and to convey particular attitudes toward his characters. We will begin with the status of the body in Hitchcock ’ s fi lms. HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 6666 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:142:41:14 THE PLEASURES AND PANGS OF HITCHCOCKIAN CONSUMPTION 67 Screening the revolting body The pleasure and disgust that alternately governed Hitchcock ’ s feelings about food and drink similarly describe his attitudes toward the human body and its capacities for consumption and elimination. As much as he framed the body as a source of scopic pleasure in his fi lms, he also frequently directed our cinematic gaze to the body as a site of abjection, and exploited it as such, albeit less frequently and less explicitly in his fi lmmaking than in his life off screen. Throughout his career, Hitchcock retained a self-confessed puerile sense of humor rooted in the functions of the body, which for him were endlessly funny and bizarre. He would often use a whoopie cushion on new guests to his house, and would feign horror and dismay as the unsuspecting guest sat on the fl atulent toy. 2 He seemed to enjoy the incommensurability of the dignifi ed English gentleman ’ s persona he performed in public, with the private jokester who could not help but titter at the mention of unmentionables. In the late 1920s, he laid a bet with one of his cameramen that the latter could not spend a night in the supposedly haunted fi lm studio, chained to his camera. The unwitting man accepted the bet, as well as a carafe of brandy, courtesy of Hitchcock, that had been spiked with laxatives, to get him through the night. The next day, the crew arrived to fi nd the mortifi ed winner of the bet, who had ruined his pants in the process — a sight that delighted the director. A running joke in several of his fi lms involved his use of the initials B. M. (an abbreviation for “ bowel movement ” ): characters Bob Marvin in The Secret Agent (1936), Barbara Morton in Strangers on a Train (1951), Ben McKenna in The Man Who Knew Too Much , and Babs Milligan and Brenda Margaret Blaney in Frenzy (1972). Additionally, John Hodiak displays a chest tattoo of the initials in Lifeboat (1944), and the “ engagement ” ring of Shadow of a Doubt bears the inscription “ TS, from BM. ” It was common for him to introduce himself jokingly (to men, rarely to women), as “ Hitch, without the cock .” This is, of course, a crude joke, but it also points to a biographical fact that Hitchcock did not mind sharing in some intimate company: his lack of sexual experience and his impotence throughout most of his adult life. During the shooting of The Birds , he described himself as “ long chaste, ” and either joked or confessed that he had had proper sex only once, to father his daughter Patricia. Several times, to the chagrin of Alma and in the presence of friends, he would share, regarding his size at the time of Pat ’ s conception, “ I was so fat I had to conceive my daughter with a fountain pen! ” 3 Clearly, elements of Hitchcock ’ s lifestyle during most of his time as an adult — such as his weight, poor circulation from sedentary work days, and HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 6677 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:142:41:14 68 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES heavy drinking — conspired to challenge his sexual performance. Hitchcock ’ s lack of bedroom experience, however, evidently did not curb his interest in bodies, sex, and sexuality — quite the opposite. His sexual dysfunction, though, may shed some light on the importance for him of rendering the body, its processes and its irregularities, comically. In another context, he candidly confessed to Francois Truffaut, “ I ’ m a celibate, you know. I ’ m not against it, but I don ’ t think about it very much. ” 4 This cinematic focus on the absurd and unpredictable aspects of embodiment offered a way for him to avoid the pitfalls of idealizing the life of physicality that was unavailable to him. To his immense credit and to our benefi t, Hitchcock chose to see his sexual outsider status as conducive to the creative process, rather than detrimental. To friend Charlotte Chandler, he said: I think that too much sex while you are working goes against the work and that repressed sex is more constructive for the creative person. It must get out, and so it goes into the work. I think it helped create a sense of sex in my work.