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sister, and this lack of intimacy was cemented during Alma’s pregnancy. Hitch became disgusted with her transformation into, shall we say, a large woman. Not that he should’ve complained, being large himself—and more on that later—but after the birth of their daughter, Patricia, who became an actress herself and is wonderful in Strangers on a Train, he supposedly never had sexual concourse with his wife again. Now, you’re young, all of you, you’re not married, so you can’t imagine this sort of thing, but Hitch, in response to this life of celibacy, developed very intense fixations on his stars, more often than not on beautiful blondes. If you’re brunette in a picture of his, you’re going down. But idealization and the dangers of perfection became major themes, and more on that later too. But what a list of women they were: Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, to name just several. Who can blame him for falling in love? And most of all with Grace Kelly—a real nympho apparently. Go ahead, report me to the administration. I’m too old to be fired or become PC. Anyway, before she bedded a man she’d disappear into her bathroom and then emerge completely naked, so perhaps there’s hope for me yet …

“I’m forgetting something. Let’s see. Oh, food. Hitch and food. He struggled mightily with his weight his whole life. Fluctuated wildly. Would lose a hundred pounds just like that and gain it right back. Topped well over three hundred at his heaviest. Hunger, for him, was a form of suspense, the most elemental form, I think, next to dangling from a high place. He said he could never have an oven without a window because if he cooked a soufflé and had to wait until the timer went off to see if it had fallen, the suspense would kill him. And it was a replacement—food was, I think—for his lack of sex. He had to fill up that void, as we all try to, right? I fill mine with love. I fall in love once a year. Drives my wife crazy. Now … ”

Onscreen, women were being stabbed in showers, choked in chairs, strangled on trains, murdered in the reflection of eyeglasses; they were thrown off church towers, attacked by seagulls, by lovers, or by strangers in the privacy of their apartments, Grace Kelly by a man emerging from behind a curtain while she talked on the phone.

“We need to go over some film terminology,” Otto said. “Take a sheet from each of the stacks I’m passing around. The second is the syllabus. But before we get into film grammar, I want to give you one important term plus some visual motifs to bear in mind. If nothing else, write these down even if you drop this class, because once you’re aware of them Hitch’s work will open up like a flower.

“So, the MacGuffin. Stated simply, this is what gets the story rolling but then fades in importance after it’s introduced. Take The 39 Steps. The hero, Hannay, meets a woman at a local London music hall who claims to be a spy hunted by assassins. They’re after her, she says, because she’s discovered a plot to steal British military secrets and something called, of course, the 39 Steps. She’s murdered that night in Hannay’s apartment, so he’s got to prove his innocence while racing all over Scotland and London trying to figure out the secret, which naturally has nothing to do with what the movie’s about. What it’s about is the hero and heroine’s struggles to trust each other. Which is the beauty of the MacGuffin, because once you learn what it is you can immediately get busy ignoring it.

“Next, stairs. Stairs are always significant in Hitchcock’s films. A character’s decision to make an ascent reflects a central moral choice, a commitment, a willingness to endanger himself or herself for someone beloved, a literal and figurative striving for a higher ground. And mirrors. He uses them to suggest doubleness, and this symbol becomes even more fraught when his work turns darker during his later films, so mirrors in Notorious mean something very different from mirrors in Vertigo or Frenzy.

“And mothers. Mothers are absolutely central to his work.