Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [175]
“Birds, obviously. For Hitch, birds are symbols of female sexuality. We’ll see them above Miss Torso’s apartment in Rear Window, the predatory bird—a horrific stuffed owl—looming behind Norman Bates in Psycho. His first victim’s name? Marion Crane. We’ll see them flying over the water as Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak stroll before the Palace of Fine Arts in Vertigo—where, by the way, we’ll also witness her death—her fall from San Juan Bautista’s tower, and I’ll argue she’s an angel who, deprived of Scottie’s ethereal, idealizing love, gets her wings clipped and no longer can fly. We’ll see The Birds, of course.
“Then there’s idleness. Pay close attention to characters who find themselves idle, by circumstance or otherwise. Hannay at the beginning of The 39 Steps. Young Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. Bruno in Strangers on a Train. Jimmy Stewart in both Rear Window and Vertigo. Ingrid Bergman at the beginning of Notorious. The murder committed out of psychological idleness in Rope or Tippi Hedren’s idleness in The Birds. Bates in Psycho, notoriously. Stillness, for Hitch, seems directly related to the expression of an inner compulsion, and its expression, projecting something buried deep within ourselves onto the world, is both the most violent thing these characters can do and also their best chance of escaping the lives in which they find themselves stuck.
“Finally, blondes. I’ve mentioned Hitch’s leading ladies briefly, but keep in mind the conflict between the idealized, perfect blonde and the imperfect, ever-rejected brunette. When we idealize, we fail to recognize that we’re seeing only our own desires, the perfected image rather than the infinite and wonderful imperfections of the beloved. And then there’s the license we subsequently take, or don’t, which is where the morality of Hitchcock lies.
“We’ll look at all these themes with a focus on marriage. Do Hitch’s movies argue that we evolve so as to become worthy of the beloved? It’s been said that the primary function of all movies is the making of a couple. Well, once that couple’s made, are they ready for what comes after? Are we viewers? Can this process—the viewing and the going under and the overcoming of these characters, these avatars—be a way out? Can marriage save your life, or is it just the beginning of a long double homicide? Hitch, I believe, knew that on some deep level he’d lost sight of his wife, that Alma, dedicated to him until they died, had always been forsaken by him. Rendered invisible. Do Hitch’s movies shake us out of this complacency? Help us see each other anew? We’ll see … ”
That afternoon, David hacked into the school’s network to get Alice’s schedule. She was a senior, a math and education major, and she also was enrolled in a feminist-theory class that started the next day, which he signed up for with a few keystrokes.
That class focused primarily on female identity, examining images of women in the media in the Fifties, particularly “the suburban housewife and the urban professional,” as Dr. Constance Petersen (a flat-out gorgeous woman, David thought) explained. “Consider, if you will, the burgeoning numbers of both,” she intoned, “and the countervailing sociological and psychological forces at work, what with nearly nineteen million professional women entering the workforce in a decade when June Cleaver was being celebrated as the ideal woman and the doyenne of that bastion of happiness and safety: the suburban home.” The students laughed knowingly, all of them women except for David, of course, him laughing out of peer pressure and not a little bit of fear, whereas theirs was smug and sprinkled with a dash of anger. “And we’ll focus as well on the male media establishment’s subsequent attempts,” the professor continued, “to assimilate