The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

and calls out for her absent mother. In Psycho, Norman Bates relives his traumatic adolescent memory when he commits murder in the guise of his mother, “Norma,” whom he killed in a fit of sexual jealousy.

Why Hitchcock’s long-standing interest in the repressed child within should have occupied him so much in this trio of very dark films is unclear. One might speculate that serious health scares he and his wife, Alma, endured in the late 1950s concentrated his mind on his mortality and dragged up unresolved issues from his past. Psycho’s screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, apparently captivated his director at the start of their collaboration when he told Hitchcock that he was in therapy. “I would go to his office directly from the couch and tell him all about it,” Stefano explained. “He was very interested and seemed delighted that I was, I guess, a different kind of animal than he’d worked with before.”

Perhaps not entirely different; Hitchcock had previously worked very productively with Ben Hecht, the so-called “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” who had written Spellbound and was also heavily interested in psychoanalysis, as indeed was the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, who hired his own therapist, Dr. May E. Romm, to work as a consultant on the production. Stefano, however, was of a younger Hollywood generation for whom the ideas of psychoanalysis and its language were an integral part of their identity. During the writing of Psycho, Stefano happily divulged some remarkable truths about his relationship with his mother that informed the Bates’s parent-child dynamic. “I said to Hitchcock one day: ‘I could’ve killed my mother. There were times when I knew I was capable of killing her.’ ” Such talk gripped Hitchcock, in part because he couldn’t imagine being so emotionally honest with anyone, including himself, and certainly not somebody he barely knew. As Stefano saw it, the childhood trauma that forces Norman into his murderous acts was not a consummated incestuous relationship with his mother as many believe, but Mrs. Bates’s sexual teasing of her son. “I saw his mother coming on to him and then stopping him,” said Stefano of the childhood trauma he imagined on Norman’s behalf.

More than once, Hitchcock observed that the breakthroughs that Marnie Edgar and John Ballantyne achieve in his films had not happened to him in his own life. Although he had apparently identified the traumatic childhood incidents that bequeathed him his fears—the police-cell incident; the time he awoke to an empty house; the forbidding priests of his school days—he still broke out in a cold sweat when he saw a policeman or heard something go bump in the night. The fairy-tale logic of his films, of course, doesn’t apply to the real world: locating trauma is the easy bit; the hard work comes in dealing with it. And, although intrigued by the theories, he expressed doubt about the efficacy of psychoanalysis. “I think I have enough silly hypotheses of my own about myself, without listening to the silly hypotheses of other people,” he told one acquaintance—though such dismissiveness may have been a way of defending himself from searching psychoanalytical readings of his darker films. In any case, one must be skeptical about the weight he placed on those memories, even if one accepts their veracity, considering the much more serious events that occurred in Hitchcock’s youth about which he said relatively little: the sudden death of his father, and London’s cataclysmic experience of World War I.

He was fourteen when the war began, nineteen at its close. There’s barely a significant European or American artist of that generation who wasn’t irreversibly affected by it. Yet if Hitchcock ever spoke about his thoughts and feelings on the outbreak of conflict in 1914, they don’t appear to have been recorded. It’s possible he was unmoved; few had any sense of the prolonged horrors ahead, and many in Europe at first regarded the war as an intense jamboree of patriotism that could cleanse and revitalize a continent stymied by the enervations of the modern age. “Over by Christmas” is what the British are reputed to have told each other about the war with Germany. If a teenage Hitchcock had any such notions, he would have been swiftly disabused of them as casualties began to pile up. Then, on December 12, 1914, his father died of chronic emphysema. Alfred, at fifteen and only a month into his job at Henley’s, was now pushed firmly into the adult world. Unlike the prison-cell experience, the emotional impact of his father’s death was something Hitchcock never broached in public. The closest to a firsthand account we have appears in his authorized biography by John Russell Taylor, published two years before his death. Having been sought out by his brother, who broke the news to him, Hitchcock went to see his sister, Nellie, who blurted out, “Your father’s dead, you know,” which, Taylor reports, “gave him a surreal sense of dissociation,” the kind of psychologically jarring moment Hitchcock would explore on film as an adult.

Within weeks of William Hitchcock’s death, the war took a dramatic turn. Germany commenced its bombing raids on England, reaching London in May 1915. The gigantic zeppelins crept across the skyline like lethal black clouds. Londoners were mesmerized and petrified. Nobody had any frame of reference for an airborne war, let alone one that targeted innocent civilians on the ground. The first raid hit Hitchcock’s home turf in the East End. Among the casualties were two children, fatally hit while walking home from the cinema. It was the start of three years of trauma and terror. The worst came on a bright, beautiful morning in June 1917, when Gotha bombers carpeted the city east to west, killing 162 civilians, including 18 infants at Upper North Street School in Poplar, half a mile from Hitchcock’s home and even closer to his old engineering school. Wounded soldiers returning from the front became a familiar part of the cityscape, and in the war’s final year, the influenza pandemic came with