By Nathan Kouri
Nate Kouri (After Hours Committee) writes about Bijou's upcoming screening of SHADOW OF A DOUBT, playing February 8 at 10pm!
A House Made of Newspaper
How much do you know about your uncle? asks a lousy detective played by Sioux City native and UI alum MacDonald Carey, resembling a sweet corn Robert Mitchum. He’s asking a teenage girl named Charlie (Teresa Wright), who comes to be called Young Charlie when her uncle, namesake, and big city beacon (Joseph Cotten) comes from the grimy East Coast to visit her sugarplum small town of Santa Rosa, California. The question, appearing halfway through Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), marks a crucial turn in our After Hours: Small Towns series, tipping it into the nightmares that small town middle-class American dreams are, first and foremost, reactions against. When it inevitably becomes impossible to hide from the evil of the world, the naïve self-defense of such dreams can only conceal it. For modern viewers, this makes Hitchcock’s film a clear ancestor to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). But Lynch’s vision is dualist, pitting good against evil in a spiritual battle, while for Hitchcock, they coexist in uneasy harmony.
Shadow of a Doubt belongs to a strain of classical Hollywood genre film that I call “patriarchal horror,” along with Cat People (1942), Whirlpool (1949), The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Bigger than Life (1956), among others. In these films, the institutions that are supposedly there to protect you—religion, education, medicine, law, military, family—are the very things that cut and trap you most violently. This is a reality for anyone these systems seize power from under the guise of it being for their own good, but in films from this period the focus is often on children, married women, or young women. These characters are always told that no one will believe them; unnecessarily, since they’ve known that their whole lives. A few moments later in the scene described above, Macdonald Carey’s detective orders Young Charlie, You’re going to keep your mouth shut because you’re a nice girl.
The ideal of a nice middle-class girl from a typical American family in a sweet small town haunts Shadow of a Doubt as much as the ideal of a well-bred upper-class wife haunts Rebecca (1940): as specters of perfect femininity mocking the reality of our heroines, their imperfect counterparts. Both films create an unpredictable fusion of their domestic spaces and their metaphysics, most obviously manifest in Shadow of a Doubt in the non-narrative repetition of a shot of waltzing ballroom dancers and in the doubling of shots, events, and characters as first chronicled by François Truffaut in his influential essay “Skeleton Keys” (1954) as “proof” of Hitchcock’s artistic vision.
More broadly, Shadow of a Doubt’s spiritual subject is the threat of misanthropy and suicide. Both Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie begin the film depressed, saying their lines lethargically in bed in nearly identical shots. When they meet, the darkness lifts, only to later be replaced with a much more insidious cynicism which warps the family and town entirely, eroding away any possibility of happiness for Young Charlie. Uncle Charlie’s misanthropic philosophy is revealed in misogynistic outbursts, cruel jokes, and saccharine, incestuous teasing (which is reciprocated, to some degree, in one of the film’s most disturbing implications). Young Charlie is the only person in town troubled by this behavior, proving that it’s not contrary to his charming, avuncular image, but is instead its logical flipside. The obvious subtext of this theme is the encroaching despair of World War II: bond ads appear on the walls of the bank and the public library, and characters are warned not to speak ill of the government.
Unlike the gloomy Charlies, the minor characters in Shadow of a Doubt are sunny and carefree. They’re usually seen reading, daydreaming of wonderful worlds and the grisly murders that are supposed to take place in them and not in Santa Rosa. Young Charlie’s father and his best friend even let off steam by hashing out the best ways to murder each other. What initially serves as the film’s comic relief later becomes its bleak counterpoint when Young Charlie sees the delusion and defensiveness behind such fantasies. It’s also Hitchcock’s knowing comment on the commodification of murder in pop culture, which both the film itself and his celebrity in general are products of.
Both sides of Shadow of a Doubt’s vision of small towns collide in a dialogue between Young Charlie and Uncle Charlie set in a seedy bar. Young Charlie sees a side of the town she’s never encountered before, embodied by their waitress, a former classmate who’s world-weary and chronically out of work. Uncle Charlie opens the conversation by trying to manipulate Young Charlie, flattering her as a woman of the world. When she doesn’t give in, he changes gears: What do you know really? You’re just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day and at night you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. His big-city condescension is revolting. But it’s the truth behind these threats that disturbs Young Charlie. You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Everyone thinks they’re too clever for Santa Rosa.
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Hitchcock’s direction in Shadow of a Doubt is closer to Hollywood’s “invisible” dramatic mode than to the later formalism he’s best known for. But it’s still worth noting: 1) the detail and rhythm of his group staging and 2) how it emphasizes Uncle Charlie’s height and physique, especially his hands. 3) Two point-of-view dolly-in close-ups, one fast and one slow, which are among the most memorable shots in all of Hitchcock. 4) How he turns the family staircase into a psychological object as much as Lynch does the Palmer’s staircase in Twin Peaks. 5) The formal principle of doubles, as mentioned above.
Pick up a copy of the Bijou Calendar, including this piece, now in print! Available at both FilmScene locations (404 E College St + 118 E College St)!