Bulletin 59 – February 2019

The innocent victim, contagious violence, scapegoating, triangular desire, erotic rivalry, the double: through a careful consideration of characters and their relationships, Humbert analyzes the treatment of these Girardian concerns in a number of Hitchcock’s best films. Breaking slightly from chronological order, he begins with a chapter on The Birds (1963). His interpretation of it is keen and thought-provoking, as when he considers the love triangle among Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor):

One might object that the rivalry between the two women remains an undercurrent. They never show irritation with or raise their voices to each other. They even show a certain mature camaraderie…. But this is precisely the point, and perhaps the key to understanding the connection between the human drama and the outbreak of monstrosity that is the birds. (8)

Continuing with this line of inquiry, Humbert turns to the question that viewers have urgently asked: Why do the birds attack?

What remains an undercurrent in the human realm—necessarily, if civilization and human values of decency and fair play are to survive—becomes viciously explicit in the aggression of the birds. By maintaining the veneer of politeness between his human protagonists while underscoring visually and narratively what lies beneath, Hitchcock highlights, as always, the contradictions in human nature. (8)

“The only difference,” Humbert stresses, “is that the violence that breaks out in other films in the form of human crime or outright psychosis is consolidated here in the birds. The external monster is, in fact, the human monster displaced” (8).

Humbert then devotes chapters to Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo(1958), and Psycho (1960). He is an adept close reader of film, and he describes what he sees (and hears) in a lucid, enlightening way. His moment-to-moment scrutiny of scenes, especially in the chapters on Vertigo and Psycho, explaining what Hitchcock is doing, relating the action as it unfolds to the issues that Girard addresses: this exemplifies the alertness to the interplay of form and content, style and theme, that good film criticism requires.

I admire the economy of Humbert’s book, but in an ideal world it would be longer, with chapters on, for example, Notorious (1946), which (as Humbert mentions in a footnote, 160), depicts a textbook-case of mimetic rivalry, with Devlin (Cary Grant) in sexual competition with Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) for Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman); and on I Confess (1953), which includes a stunning scene of scapegoating as a crowd gathers menacingly around Father Logan (Montgomery Clift), whom everyone is convinced—despite his acquittal at trial—is a murderer. There is no chapter on Rear Window (1954) or North by Northwest (1959)—that’s a disappointment too. In a way, however, to say this is less a criticism of Humbert than a tribute to him—he makes his reader want more.

I also wish that Humbert had supplied cinematic comparison and contrast—that is, more film history. His scrutiny of Hitchcock is excellent, but it is something of a surprise to encounter no references to, for example, Ford, Hawks, or Welles.

Humbert does a good job with Shadow of a Doubt, a masterpiece about the charming deceiver Uncle Charles (brilliantly played by Joseph Cotten), a movie that Hitchcock made in the middle of World War II that discloses and dramatizes the unnerving truth that “murderers walk among us even in quaint American towns” (22). This vividly calls to mind, for me, Welles’s The Stranger, three years later, which is keyed to a fugitive (and unrepentant) Nazi war criminal named Franz Kindler, who has reinvented himself as Charles Rankin, a highly respected, beloved teacher in a prep school for boys in a town in Connecticut.

Some consideration of films like this one by Welles and by other of Hitchcock’s contemporaries and rivals might have sharpened our sense of what made him distinctive in his era and makes him still unique today.

Humbert also says little about actors, about the performances they give, and the pleasure we take in responding to those actors—Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart, among others—whom Hitchcock cast two or more times.

That said, Humbert’s book is a rewarding one for students of Hitchcock, and, just as much or more, it contributes to the ongoing, ever-widening inter-disciplinary interpretation of Girard. In the midst of elucidating Hitchcock, Humbert leads us to think anew about the strengths and limits of Girard’s profound work. We feel the relevance of Girard to Hitchcock, but also the pressure that Hitchcock applies to Girard—the films interrogate the texts.

I struggle in particular with Girard’s claims about mimetic contagion, agency, and conversion, terms that Humbert relies on for his examination of Hitchcock. The relationship among these terms, and their connection to providence, divine intercession, and grace: this is something that Girard gestures toward, implies, touches on, but that in my view he never fully works out. It has been left for us to clarify, if we can, the connections that Girard labored to articulate, and, in this respect, Humbert provides a valuable service.

In, for example, the final scenes of Shadow of a Doubt, the sinister Uncle Charles is killed, falling from a train as he attempts to murder his niece Charlie. Humbert says that Uncle Charles falls “out of the frame to his death”:

Justice is done, but behind the scenes and in spite of human error, as if a providential order were at work that supplements flawed and inaccurate human justice. This is not the only instance in which Hitchcock seems to display a Catholic and Jansenist conception of both the corruption of human order and the unpredictable operation of a compensatory but invisible order. (35)

Humbert sees in Hitchcock a Jansenist emphasis on the efficacy of grace, and I believe that increasingly Girard, too, moved in this direction. Humbert returns to a version of this point in his probing chapter on The Wrong Man, a riveting film based on “the real-life story of Emmanuel (Manny) Balestrero,” hauntingly acted by Henry Fonda, who “is wrongly accused and arrested for a series of robberies” (75).

In a sequence of scenes that Humbert calls attention to, Hitchcock shows the scapegoating of this innocent man. Manny is a hardworking bassist in a jazz combo, a devoted husband, a loving father of two sons, a practicing Catholic. But when he enters an insurance office to ask for a loan, an office-worker—fearful about and fixated on recent robberies—concludes from his appearance that he is the thief. She tells someone else, who tells someone else, and rapidly the chain of persecutors is constructed: everyone confirms the suspicions of one another and sets to the side any and all doubt—as very soon the police detectives do as well. Manny seems doomed to imprisonment, and his wife Rose (Vera Miles), traumatized by the ordeal, is sent to an asylum for the emotionally and mentally disturbed. But then, suddenly, Manny is saved.

“What can I do?” Manny asks his mother. She tells him to pray, which he says he has done but with no remedy. His mother persists, begging Manny to recommit to prayer. As he leaves the room to get ready for work, his mother prays, and, as the camera shifts to him, in his room, putting on his white shirt, his eyes catch sight on the wall of a painting of Jesus, in halo, Sacred Heart exposed.

The camera zooms toward Jesus and then quickly cuts to a close-up of Manny’s eyes. He prays, and this scene dissolves to another of a man walking down a dark street. Even as Hitchcock stays close-up on Manny’s face as he prays, he brings more and more into view the man walking, whose face, as he approaches us, merges with Manny’s. We experience visually how the scapegoating was triggered. This is the real thief, and in minutes he will be caught.

Humbert says:

Manny’s mother’s recommendation that he must pray and Manny’s decision to do so before the picture of Christ precede the chance discovery of the true culprit in the robberies. Hitchcock seems to suggest that Manny is just as responsible as his accusers to react to chance and fate, but also that virtue comes about by an exchange, in this case with his mother.

It is misleading, I think, to say that the discovery of the real thief happens by “chance.” The point that the film is making is that the mother’s prayer spurs Manny’s prayer, which, even as he is uttering the words, brings into being the thief on the street, who grows ever-larger and more Manny-like as he comes ever-closer to us. It is not a chance occurrence, but a miracle that transpires before our eyes. Manny prayed when there seemed no hope. Someone finally listened and intervened, and the only possible someone that the film identifies is Jesus.

Humbert concludes:

By his action Manny breaks the chain of mimetic contagion and refuses the despairing response that has consumed the mind of his wife. It is indeed human error, the failure to resist flawed but contagious human desire, that works injustice and subjects the innocent to suffering and dereliction. The courage to resist the tide may indeed come from a source that must be super-natural if it is to be effective. But on this issue Hitchcock remains resolutely silent. (92)

Here again, Humbert’s formulation is a bit off the mark. The source that matters is less the one that inspires prayer than the one that intercedes to make certain that justice is served. Hitchcock could have ended his film with Manny’s act of prayer: we would not know whether a good outcome followed from it or not. Ultimately, so a believer knows, justice is always served, but human beings are not in charge of the time-table for it. We might pray, with no result as far as we can see. Or, we might pray and, on this occasion, find our life transformed.

This is a crucial issue for our response to Hitchcock, but equally so for our response to Girard. In his books on literature, religion, anthropology, and culture, he repeatedly stresses the sheer force of desire, and most of the time the examples that he cites illustrate human behavior in destructive and self-damaging forms. Humbert’s words about Hitchcock could be applied to Girard: he “records the shadow that falls across human life when desires clash, differences are erased, and doubles emerge everywhere” (139).

During the Passion narrative, for example, Peter denies that he knows Jesus. He goes with the crowd, he is desperately eager to identify with them—to be identified as one of them. For Girard, this testifies not to a psychological flaw in Peter but, instead, to the irresistible force of mimetic contagion. As Girard states in Sacrifice (Le Sacrifice): “Peter cannot help but imitate their hostility [Pierre ne peut pas s’empêcher d’imiter son hostilité]. If we psychologize this denial, if we attribute it to the suggestible temperament of the apostle, we seek to prove (unconsciously) that in Peter’s place, we would not have denied Jesus” (2003: 68-69). We would have behaved as Peter did: we are no stronger, no better, than he.

How then do we resist—can we resist?—the pressure of mimetic desire and contagion? Girard says that we should seek and choose good models, the best of whom is Jesus. But it is not really a matter of choice, because Girard’s ironclad claim about mimetic desire is that we succumb to it. We have no choice, no agency of our own.

Then again, in a paradox that Girard does not directly engage, it seems after all that we do have a choice. We can pray for divine guidance and support; we can pray that we will made better. We will falter and stumble; our nature remains imperfect. But we can make choices, choosing to pray as Manny does after the appeal from his mother. The viewer of the film cannot be certain, but Manny’s prayer may have led to his salvation—in two senses, spiritual and secular. If he had not prayed, the thief might not have been caught, and Manny, the wrong man, would have been tried, convicted, and sent to prison. We seek to be steadfast in our faith and pray in the hope that blessings like this will come to us.

Yet The Wrong Man has a grim, tragic ending. Safe at last himself, Manny visits Rose only to find that she is unable to process the fact that he has been found innocent. She cannot hear what Manny says to her. To the nurse on duty, Manny comments that he was hoping for a miracle, to which she replies that miracles happen but that it “takes time.” Manny and the nurse walk out the door and, their backs to the viewer, down a dark hallway toward a lit corridor. The film thus closes with a damaged woman, a grieving husband, a broken marriage and family. Where, we ask, is God now?

The answer comes in an instant, as Manny and the nurse reach the light. This text appears on the screen: “Two years later, Rose Balastrero walked out of the sanitarium—completely cured.” We are told that “today she lives happily in Florida with Manny and the two boys.” All have awakened from their nightmare.

Like others, Humbert judges this to be a flaw in the film, but in my view it is not. The text is there not only because this is what happened in the real-life story on which The Wrong Man is based, but also because it confirms the good fortune that providentially came to Manny after he prayed and was rescued from imprisonment. This family’s tragedy was real but short-term. Later on, happiness came again to Manny’s wife and to him and their sons. It took time but this family found—it was given—the happiness they had lost. Here is the reward that can come from prayer, and from patience, the virtue that includes both courage and faith, the virtue that is the most indispensable for a Christian.

Manny prays, but he does something else—or, rather, he does not do something else. He does not react with hate-filled violence to his unjust treatment and to the terror that the crucible of his scapegoating has inflicted on his wife. Manny does what Girard often counsels—imitate Jesus, do not reciprocate, do not replicate the vengeful example of others.

In 1 Peter 2, we encounter these words: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly” (21-23). There is no guarantee that when we seek consolation and support that our prayers will be answered. They might be, and immediately. Or, it could take two years, or longer, much longer. But “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (1 Peter 3:8).

At first glance, Hitchcock and Girard might seem an odd couple. But, as Humbert’s fine book attests, each illuminates the other through the Catholicism they share and the religious ideas they explore. The dynamic relationship between the great films and the provocative books impels us to think deeply about ourselves, and about our place in a world that imperils us and the salvation within and beyond it that we hope we will receive.