Pruim 1Andrew PruimProfessor Paul FaganCMA: Hitchcock18 January 2016

Re-exploring Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright

Released in the middle of Hitchcock’s career, Stage Fright (1950) is neither an early

work nor a later masterpiece, and was negatively received by its first audiences. Critics on

the other hand have clung to the film, but tend to focus on “what” Stage Fright did as an

example of the unreliable narrator and its use of a lying flashback. Analysis of the film has

tended to neglect how and why Hitchcock’s choice was important in its historical context. In

this paper I will reexamine the role of Stage Fright in the canon of Hitchcock films for the

audience and for critics in understanding Hitchcock based on both narrative theoretical and

spectral readings of the film.

The best description of the film is given by David H. Richter:

Stage Fright begins with Eve Gill and Johnny Cooper (Jane Wyman and Richard

Todd) rapidly motoring toward the English coast, escaping from the police. Less

than forty seconds after the film begins, Johnny begins an explanation of why the

police are hot on his trail for a murder he did not commit, and the film fades to a

flashback over thirteen minutes long, explaining what he did to help his lover

Charlotte Inwood cover up her murder of her husband and how he by mischance

became the object of police suspicion himself. Toward the end of the film, however,

we learn that this explanation is untrue, that Johnny murdered Charlotte’s husband,

has murdered before and gotten away with it, and that he intends to murder Eve,

who only escapes by her quick wits. (23)

By lying in a flashback, Stage Fright challenged the narrative expectations of both

audiences and critics about truth and reliability1. When asked about the structure of Stage

Fright during his 1962 interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock replied:

“I did one thing in that picture which I should never have done, to put in a flashback

that was a lie [....] But why not? [...] Why can’t you have a man describe a story, and

if we accept the truth of a story in terms of a flashback, why can’t we tell a lie in a

flashback?”

His response captured the initial reactions of audiences and critics that he should never

have attempted such a feat, posed the critical question “Why not?” that has led to many of

the debates surrounding this film, and set the groundwork for our exploration of “Why?”

I ... put in a flashback that was a lie

1 “Narrative comes in two variations the structure of the text itself and that which is told to the spectator” (Hayward 256).

Pruim 2A traditional understanding of narrativity underlies why people believed that he

should never have put in a flashback that was a lie. Defined by Braudy and Cohen as “the

process by which a perceiver actively constructs a story from the fictional data provided by

the narrative medium” (83), narrativity relies on the relationships between narrative structure,

narrator or narration, and the narratee.

Narrative structure is traditionally made up of two parts:2 story, the events as they are

told to or seen by the audience, and plot, what happens in chronological order within the

created world (see Figure 1).34 Stage Fright challenges this model of story building by giving

the audience a story event that has no place within the final plot construction. This decision

by Hitchcock deliberately broke the film away from the normal sequence of events in

traditional Hollywood Cinema and opposed the long standing film expectations of presenting

verisimilitude, reality, and plausibility5 (Chatman 95, 227, Hayward 64, Advameg 3, Richter

12-13, Hitchcock “Let Them”, Richter 13).

In traditional narrative structure, a narrator is “the storyteller” -- the person or thing6

responsible for presenting the story to the audience. In the opening flashback of Stage Fright

the narrator is Cooper. He is a character narrator and actively tells us the story. It is his

“mindscreen”7 that we enter and his personal subjectivity and mental process that frames

what we see unfold on screen. Ross points out that the presentation of a character’s

mindscreen also includes cueing the spectator (9). Cues for flashbacks vary and can include

overt marks of transition such as the dissolve (Chatman 64) as well as representational

images, titles, spoken language, and music (Metz qtd Advameg). In Stage Fright, Cooper’s

narrational spoken language and a cross dissolve signal the flashback to the audience in a

traditional manner (see Figure 2). However, with the advantage of having seen the entire

2 I have chosen to use story and plot as defined here, but it should be noted that there are a variety of terms and definitions that have been used to describe these two aspects of narrative. It is particularly important to note that Chatman uses the alternative terminology of discourse = story and story = plot. This can cause some confusion when quoting Chatman’s work and discussing it in the context of others arguments. I have done my best in this text to signal to which idea quoted works refer.3 Some theorists have proposed that the camera itself (Ross 6, Modleski P11) or an “implied author” (Chatman 28, 227, 233) should take precedent over the search for character narrators in film. I personally side with the arguments of Ross and Casetti that all film texts require a narrator and narratee separate from the narrative (Ross 16, Caseti 77). Certainly in the context of Stage Fright’s opening flashback we are presented with a well defined character narrator.4 “Mindscreen” is a term used in film theory to discuss the capacity of film to show the subjectivity and mental process of characters (Kuhn). 5 “If the audience does know, if they have been told all the secrets that the characters do not know, they'll work like the devil for you because they know what fate is facing the poor actors. That is what is known as ‘playing God.’ That is suspense” (Hitchcock “Let ‘Em”).6 A narrator is “worthy of trust” when they have “an effective mandate, a competence, a parallel performance, and a sanction” (Casetti, 80).7 In reference to the belief at the time that images should be “as they come out of the camera” (Sitney 71).

Pruim 3film, (or at the very least having read a summary of it), we can categorize Cooper as an

unreliable narrator.

Chatman describes the basic form of “unreliable narration” as when “the narrator’s

account is at odds with the implied reader’s surmises about the story’s real intentions.” Or

more simply when “the [plot] undermines the [story]” (233). Part of what makes Cooper’s

unreliable narration work is the narrative expectations for suspense. Often called “The

Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock was known for letting his viewers “play god” by giving them

privileged information that the characters on screen don’t have in order to harness the

audience's expectations and anticipation89. Casetti described this as providing the audience

with suspicion, the tools needed to construct a narrative and the motivations of characters

(70). Since Cooper and Hitchcock withhold the correct information until near the end of the

film, they intentionally let viewer build the wrong story10 and experience a surprise deception.

Surprise deceptions, such as the one found in Stage Fright, were not done in the Classic

Hollywood Cinema, and when paired with traditional models of trust in film open up many

layers of exploration into the reaction of the narratee.

The narratee is the person or people to whom the story is addressed. They are “the

listener” of the text. When the narratee is internal to the story, the narratee helps provide a

guarantee of truth and more clearly define the narrator (Casetti 76, Chatman 261).

According to Casetti’s model of the narratee11 Eve as the on screen narratee acts as the

viewer’s signal for trust. In addition to providing a parallel performance that does not

question the story, she even supports it when she says to Cooper, “That doesn’t surprise

me.” In addition her past relationship with Cooper (“We’re such old friends”) further solidifies

Cooper as a friend of the audience and establishes concern for his predicament and a belief

that he could not have done wrong.

Of course, all of these coded readings turned out to be untrue, and the 1950s

audience did not react well to the surprise at the end of the film. Conditioned by the

unspoken “fictional contract” between viewers and films, in which the audience agrees to

subject themselves to specific emotional roles (Kuhn, Plantinga 380, 383), audiences were

generally upset. This may be in part because as Plantinga says, ”Anger occurs when I

recognize a demeaning offence against me or mine. Guilt arises when I believe I have

8“the French critics reproach you for that” (Truffaut to Hitchcock 1962) see also Chatman 237.9 1951 was a crucial year when critical reactions to narrative construction changed (Hayward 20, Chatman 237). See Appendix for additional information.10 It should be noted the even though Hitchcock was one of the first mainstream directors to embrace alternative narratives, he was not really the first person to challenge perceptions and expectations within the narrative structure of film. Avantgarde artists such as Maya Deren had already concluded after her 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon “that the space and time of film was a made space and time, a creative function and not a universal given”(Stiney, 21).11 “The elemental authority of the photographic image lends reality even to the most artificial events recorded by it” (Sitney 38).

Pruim 4transgressed a moral imperative [...]” (381). After watching the film the audience felt anger

on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the betrayed Eve for being slighted by an

unreliable narrator. The audience's guilt is best laid out by Quincey in his essay on MacBeth

which concludes that, “in these murders of the amphitheatre, the hand which inflicts the fatal

blow is not more deeply imbrued in blood than his who sits and looks on.” With the final

reveal the audience realizes that they became unknowing accomplices in both a murder and

hiding a murderer.

But why not?Initial critic reactions to Stage Fright were not much different from those of the

average film goer. Focused on the loss of verisimilitude in the text and the belief that images

should be “ipso facto” (“factory perfect”12) “true,” many critics, and the French in particular13,

were unhappy with Hitchcock for breaking the “rules” (Chatman 237). This stance did not last

long, however, because French publications such as Cahiers du Cinéma soon began to

develop auteuristic critiques of film focused on the director as artist14, permitting directors to

have much more leeway in production and in the presentation of stories.

Stage Fright provided a rich ground for debating the merits of this re-emerging

theoretical model in the 1950s. Critics began to ask important questions such as: Was this

manipulation of audience done intentionally? What did the film have to say (or not) about

Hitchcock’s escape from Classical Hollywood Cinema? What indeed was Hitchcock’s

“style”? And of course Hitchcock’s rhetorical question, “why can’t we tell a lie in a

flashback?”

Many answers have been proposed to these questions in the decades since 1950.

These answers range from justifications that novelists and other artists have the right to get

some things wrong (Richter 20) to more progressive and historical views that contextualize

Stage Fright within film development and the gradual “desensitization” of audiences to

temporal shifts and the question “‘Was X right about the past?’”(Bordwell 79).

Perhaps the strongest example of shifting audience expectations and understanding

of “wrongness”15 was observed by Modleski in her presentation of Hitchcock’s film Vertigo.

Even though it was made only 8 years after Stage Fright, Hitchcock is quoted as saying,

12 “[I]n Stage Fright there are no peculiarities, no incongruities, and no unmotivated elements. The viewer’s flawed interpretations are not merely the obvious ones but the only possible ones because the data are coherent, but false” (Anderson 87).13 Richter describes the construction of “wrongness” as dependent on “what the audience knows, and what the audience cares about” (20).14 Hitchcock would go one step further and say, “[viewers] are not intellectual enough [...] they don’t examine things on the high enough plane” (Hitchcock “Truffaut”).15 Truffaut went so far as to say that when viewing a Hitchcock film ““suspense is not ‘a minor form of the spectacle,’ but ‘the spectacle in itself’” (Braudy and Cohen 83).

Pruim 5“they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture.” As the audience

has continued to negotiate a revised audience contract, more recent films such as Memento

(2000) and Inception (2010) have even draw on the surprise deception as their appeal,

challenging the lines between subjectivity, reality, and memory.

A Spectral Exploration“the artist wishes to express himself

and chooses only those forms which are sympathetic to his soul”

(Kandinsky 56).

In "Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms", Colin Davis proposes two key ideas about

how the spiritual manifests itself in narratives. The first is that texts can include phantoms

that “lie about the past.” The second is that texts contain spectral elements that “gesture

towards a still unformulated future” (Davis 379). Because “‘all forms of narrative are spectral

to some extent’” (Wolfrey qtd. Davis 378) and stories can be “the narrator’s [an author’s]

unconscious desire to know the story of his own origins” (375), this method of narrative

analysis can be applied to Stage Fright alongside a trajectory of Hitchcock’s life to provide a

perspective on Hitchcock that has been underexplored by audiences and critics alike.

In the realm of spirituality, the central controversy surrounding the flashback in Stage

Fright can be seen as a “pure artist’s” search “to express inner truths in their work”

(Kandinsky 10). A process Kandinsky further described as:

[Art] begins to specialize, thus becoming comprehensible only to the artists, [...] An

artist, in such times, is not even expected to have a message but can attract

attention through some particular ‘originality’ or ‘eccentricity’ (19).

It can certainly be seen that Stage Fright exhibits originality, an originality that many critics

disliked. But what about the “inner truths”?

Beyond the challenge of the opening flashback to classic Hollywood norms, the

changing roles played by Eve throughout Stage Fright open up a reflection of Hitchcock’s

personal identity struggle. Hitchcock immigrated to the United States in 1939 but did not

become a citizen until 1955. Produced during this period Stage Fright foregrounds

Hitchcock’s motif of changing identity roles to an extent not seen in many of his other films.

Over the course of the film Eve takes on the roles of news reporter, maid, detective, lover,

friend, guardian, and informant to name a few. While Eve does manage to convince many

people of her new/different identities, there seems to also be something of “Eve” that

continues to show through. Right away when Eve first tries to dress as the maid, her mother,

even without her glasses on, recognizes her at the door. Later, when Eve as Doris (the

maid) works to get information from Charlotte Inwood (the main suspect), Inwood suddenly

recognizes Eve’s boldness as “not the maid”.

Pruim 6Perhaps the most important recognition that something isn’t right in Eve’s identity

changes throughout the film comes from Hitchcock himself. Shortly after Eve leaves her

house to go to work as Doris the maid, Hitchcock, in one of his famous cameos, walks past

her on the sidewalk and looks back. It’s almost as if Hitchcock himself is recognizing that

something isn’t right with Eve’s identity, that there is something there that deserves a second

look. (See Figure 3).

In the same way the film plays with the different identities of Eve, it struggles to

present what or who Hitchcock is at his core. Will he continue to be just another director in

the production system or will he embrace his individuality and become an auteur? This

theme was discussed indirectly but extensively in Hitchcock’s 1962 interview with Truffaut.

When asked how/why he chose to present the story of Stage Fright Hitchcock answered,

“There were a couple of book reviews who said this would make a good Hitchcock film. And I

like an idiot believed it.” Here he hinted at the desire to produce his own style of film.

Something that placed him at odds with the pressures of Hollywood cinematic production

system, where he had learned the philosophy “when you feel things are not working right [...]

we must run [for] cover or play safe.” Following this line of thought, Hitchcock continued by

saying he should never have endeavored to film Stage Fright.

This philosophy is countered again, however, by the end of the interview segment.

Truffaut points out that Hitchcock has for some time been avoiding the studio similarity and

enslavement common throughout the war period by taking elements from all the different

studios regardless of where he was working at the time. The result? “He created an end

product which resembles Mr. Hitchcock himself...which mirrors Hitchcock himself”

(Hitchcock, “Truffaut”).

This mirror takes on a spectral form with the closing remark of Hitchcock that, “One

of the pieces of good fortune that I’ve had is that no one else understands this meuleau [...]

of suspense...that's why I’ve had the field to myself.” Hitchcock’s comment hints at the

potential, but at the time unformulated, (thus spectral) future of the industry as others began

to explore the depths and potentials of suspense. It also reflects Kandinsky’s observation

that the spiritual in art leads to artwork that is “comprehensible only to the artists” at the time

but later contributes to new norms (19, 56-58).

ConclusionWhy should we reconsider Stage Fright within the canon of Hitchcock films? The

answer is a complicated one that goes beyond what Hitchcock did and requires an

understanding of how and why “what” he did was important and different from the

contemporary norms. Such an examination provides new possibilities in exploring

Hitchcock’s work on a higher --a spiritual-- plane. A careful look at this level reveals the film

Pruim 7as a mirror of Hitchcock during a transitionary period in his life and an influencer of today’s

norms. If exploring Stage Fright in depth can teach us anything it is best summed up by

Strauss, “Hitchcock’s films, forever eluding easy analyses, arousing in us with repeated

viewings ever fresh, but ultimately unknowable, layers of meaning”(55)16.

Word Count: 2500

16 The distinction between story and plot is further defined by No Film School’s Justin Morrow, “The plot [is] what happens. The story in a movie, on the other hand, is why it happens, and how.”

Pruim 8

Figures

Fig. 1. “Plot vs Story”

Fig. 2. “I was in my kitchen. It was about 5:00.” (Detail)

Fig. 3. “Hitchcock’s Stage Fright Cameo” (Detail)

Pruim 9

Appendix: Additional Key Concepts

Classic Hollywood CinemaA working definition of Classical Hollywood Cinema is important when discussing film

theory because it has been established as the standard against which all other forms of

cinema and in particular temporality have been measured (Mellamphy 1, and others).

Beginning around the end of World War One, dominating film structure in the 1930s, and

lasting until the early 1960s (Bordwell, Hayward 64) Classical Hollywood Cinema produced

films with clear narratives and defined goals that were either achieved or not achieved

(Hayward 64, Bordwell 157). In these films even flashbacks followed the “rules” of providing

motivated signs to guide viewers to inevitable conclusions (Hayward 64, 66). This is because

traditional audiences have required being able to identify “it as having occurred before the

present and must be able to place it in the chronological order of the story” (Ross 20).

Auteurism vs AutorenfilmIt is important to distinguish Auteurism from the German Autorenfilm. The German

Autorenfilm was a theoretical model circa 1913 focused on the writer as the artist of the film

(Hayward 19-20). Auteurism is a French term that began in the 1920s and became popular

after the 1950s (Hayward 20). It was, and still is, used to describe a director and their body

of work, specifically focused on “stylistic constants” of mise-en-scéne and filmmaking

practices that were considered a director’s signature (Stiney xii, Hayward 20). The process

of developing auteurism creates an entity “usually identified with the director’s name--to

which we can attribute intention, the source of meaning” (Anderson 81). A theoretical shift to

historical contexts and then post-structuralism began in the 1980s. With this change the

director lost authority for the intention of the work and became “a figure constructed out of

her or his films” (Hayward 388).

Pruim 10

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Figure SourcesFig. 1. “Plot vs. Story.” Pruim, Andrew J. Plot vs. Story. 2016. Digital Image. Pruim Digital

Media.

Fig. 2. “I was in my kitchen. It was about 5:00.” Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Stage Fright. Warner

Bros. Pictures, 1950. Screenshot. 7 Dec. 2015.

Fig. 3. “Hitchcock’s Stage Fright Cameo” Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Stage Fright. Warner Bros.

Pictures, 1950. Screenshot. 7 Dec. 2015.

A Film Analysis of: Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Stage Fright. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1950.

iTunes. Nov. 2015.