Alfred Hitchcock, The Repeat Offender

A little boy is playing in a clearing, surrounded by beautiful fall colors. Holding a toy machine gun, he stalks imaginary enemies, engrossed in his childish daydream of war. Suddenly, he sees a real body lying at his feet, a man as stiff as a board. He runs for help.

Meanwhile, a hunter armed with a real rifle discovers the corpse and thinks that he may have accidentally killed the man when shooting at his prey. He tries to conceal the body behind some bushes, but each time he starts to move it, other people appear, forcing him to hide.

So it goes with the cumbersome corpse in The Trouble with Harry (1955). Over the course of the film, the body will be discovered several times, buried several times, and unearthed several times. With this macabre comedy, Alfred Hitchcock abandoned the dramatic thriller that made his name in favor of a mostly humorous film. The instrument of comedy is repetition, as it so often is. The more a gag is repeated, the more intense its comic potential. This is one of the most popular theories in the art of humor: Repetition is amusing. Although repetition is a key device in Hitchcock’s work, it’s rarely used as a comedic tool. Rather, it’s a tragic one: The more an event is repeated, the more intense its disturbing, deadly, dramatic potential.

The characters in Hitchcock’s films are the first to be confronted with the implacable principle of repetition, many of whom are traumatized as a result. In Spellbound (1945), John (Gregory Peck) loses control whenever he sees stripes, bars, or lines. We discover that when he was a child, he witnessed a fatal accident: His younger brother was impaled on a fence. In Marnie (1964), the titular character (Tippi Hedren) is terrified of booming thunder and the color red. The plot reveals a murder on a stormy night when she was a child. At the beginning of Vertigo (1958), the detective Scottie (James Stewart) falls from a roof while pursuing a malefactor. Later, whenever he mounts any height, even a foot ladder, he loses his balance and falls. The traumatized subject is always brought back to the same point in their violent biography. The slightest echo of the original drama produces the same psychic collapse. The trauma repeats its effects in a loop.

Hitchcock also directed two of the most memorable dream sequences in cinema, one created by artist Salvador Dalí for Spellbound and the other by graphic designer Saul Bass for Vertigo. A dream embodies the pure principle of repetition by replaying on a different stage – the imagination of the traumatized person – what really happened the first time.

Another category of characters subjected to the hell of repetition is murderers, all of whom kill while in the grip of a violent compulsion. Jack the Ripper haunts The Lodger (1927), condemned to kill the same type of young blond woman over and over. In Strangers on a Train (1951), Bruno (Robert Walker) pretends to strangle a woman to amuse guests at a party, but once his hands are around her neck, he can’t stop, and he repeats the crime he committed at the beginning of the film. Bob (Barry Foster) in Frenzy (1972), Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and, of course, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960) are all prey to the same compulsion. While the traumatized character can be saved from repetition, the serial killer is destined to self-destruct.

There is, however, another category of assassins in Hitchcock: Those who kill not to satisfy a compulsion stronger than themselves, but purely out of self-interest. These calculating characters repeat their crimes as if they were rehearsing for a play. They are the spies in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), who listen to a cantata over and over again to find the precise moment when the sound of a gunshot can be covered up by the clang of the cymbals. In Dial M for Murder (1954), Tony acts out for the man he has hired to strangle his wife Margot (Grace Kelly) the exact movements he should make while committing the crime.

For Hitchcock repetition is transcendent. It cannot be planned by humans and usually turns against them: Carefully prepared crimes never happen as planned. A fortuitous element – a spectator who screams before the clash of the cymbal, a pair of scissors lying on a table – prevents what has been rehearsed from repeating itself in the same way.

Hitchcock’s obsession with repetition is not unrelated to the way the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma used his films to legitimize its auteur theory in the 1950s. What is an auteur if not an artist who continues to study the same characters, go back to the same places, and revel in the same material? Hitchcock’s work, with its signs of identification and recognition, was a godsend for auteur theorists. The same cold blond heroines, the same close-ups of faces in agony or ecstasy (“Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders,” said Hitchcock), men suspended in the void about to fall (James Stewart in Rear Window and Vertigo, the killer clinging to the Statue of Liberty in Foreign Correspondent, Cary Grant hanging from Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest), Hitchcock himself popping up in the background of every film he made. Even more than his characters, the filmmaker played with and enjoyed repetition. And it so happened that, at the height of his career, he made two masterpieces entirely devoted to the principle: Vertigo and Psycho.

Scottie the detective in Vertigo falls madly in love with Madeleine (Kim Novak), a woman he is investigating. But Madeleine seems haunted by a woman who lived in another century, Carlotta, whose wanderings in the city she repeats in a state of semi-somnambulism. Madeleine repeats the life of Carlotta, then her death, throw- ing herself from the top of a steeple. But Madeleine herself will be replicated: Scottie meets a young woman, Judy, Madeleine’s double, and makes her dress, do her hair, and behave like Madeleine. As for Norman in Psycho, he replicates both his actions – murdering young women in a motel room – and a person – his mother, whom he reproduces through a disguise. In both cases, repetition is a denial of the principle of mortality. The woman – a mistress or a mother – who died is recreated, copied after she was accidentally or deliberately killed.

The genius of Vertigo and Psycho lies in an extraordinary formal device that is represented not only through characters, but in their very structure. Both films split in the middle because a woman dies. Once the film has reached this central break, the story is rewound and restarted, taking the exact same path once more. Everything comes back: The places, the situations, the dialogues, as if the films were haunted by themselves. Vertigo and Psycho seem to give birth in the middle of their own remake.

That these two films were made between 1958 and 1960 is, of course, not incidental. This was the exact moment when the history of cinema was cut in two itself, as it moved from the classical to the modern age with the New Wave and New Hollywood. These films were made by movie lovers, fans who kept reproducing what fascinated them. They made movies that repeat other movies, cinema about cinema. Psycho, films about fetishists, have been fetishized in turn, or that these two films about copying (with taxidermist characters who try to find the spirit of a dead person in the body of a living one) are the most copied in the history of the cinema.

The list is long: Brian De Palma has done the Psycho shower scene around 10 times and copied the structure of Vertigo at least three times. The image of a knife filmed at a low angle before entering the victim’s flesh has been stolen by thousands of horror movies, from Halloween to Scream. Gus Van Sant pushed the principle of repetition to an extreme by reproducing Psycho shot by shot in 1999, as enthralled to the ghost of the mother film as Norman Bates was to the will of his dead mother. And, with Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), thrillers cut in half in which women disappear and return, David Lynch propelled the Hitchcockian imagination into a more modern, esoteric, abstract, 21st-century form. Today, Hitchcock repeats himself, not in his films, but in those of others, some of the most important names in modern cinema.

This feature was originally published in Mastermind 05 – buy all issues here.