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Must We Kill the Thing We Love? - Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Hardcover)
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Must We Kill the Thing We Love? - Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Hardcover)
Series: Film and Culture Series
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William Rothman argues that the driving force of Hitchcock's work
was his struggle to reconcile the dark vision of his favorite Oscar
Wilde quote, "Each man kills the thing he loves," with the
quintessentially American philosophy, articulated in Emerson's
writings, that gave classical Hollywood movies of the New Deal era
their extraordinary combination of popularity and artistic
seriousness. A Hitchcock thriller could be a comedy of remarriage
or a melodrama of an unknown woman, both Emersonian genres, except
for the murderous villain and godlike author, Hitchcock, who pulls
the villain's strings-and ours. Because Hitchcock believed that the
camera has a murderous aspect, the question "What if anything
justifies killing?," which every Hitchcock film engages, was for
him a disturbing question about his own art. Tracing the trajectory
of Hitchcock's career, Rothman discerns a progression in the films'
meditations on murder and artistic creation. This progression
culminates in Marnie (1964), Hitchcock's most controversial film,
in which Hitchcock overcame his ambivalence and fully embraced the
Emersonian worldview he had always also resisted. Reading key
Emerson passages with the degree of attention he accords to
Hitchcock sequences, Rothman discovers surprising affinities
between Hitchcock's way of thinking cinematically and the
philosophical way of thinking Emerson's essays exemplify. He finds
that the terms in which Emerson thought about reality, about our
"flux of moods," about what it is within us that never changes,
about freedom, about America, about reading, about writing, and
about thinking are remarkably pertinent to our experience of films
and to thinking and writing about them. He also reflects on the
implications of this discovery, not only for Hitchcock scholarship
but also for film criticism in general.
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