Rule Of Symbolism / Alfred Hitchcock

Spellbound (1945)

• The film has more dream sequences than in most movies from the 1940s — Two to be specific. There is, of course, the big crazy dream sequence with the scissors and the eyes and the playing cards. But there's another sequence—shorter, but still goofy. It's the scene where Constance goes up to the room "Edwardes" is staying in, and they kiss. There's a close-up of Constance's face, and then a cutaway to a series of doors opening into the distance, as the lush, romantic score does its hyperbolic lush, romantic thing. The symbolism here is obvious: Constance was cold and shut off from the world, but now, with the kiss, she's being opened to love. All the barriers inside her are falling, one after the other. The imagery is also a sexual joke, though. This imagery of doors opening is a symbol of Constance opening sexually. The doors aren't just about Constance opening emotionally—they're also about a physical opening. Films in 1945 couldn't show, or even directly imply, that the protagonists were having sex. But this is a way to say they did it, even while Constance and "Edwardes" are standing in the room, fully clothed.
• At the end of the film, Constance explains that the eyes on the curtains symbolize "the guards at Green Manors." Ballantyne's dream is a kind of code telling Constance that Dr. Murchison is the evil, Mad Scientist villain. The eyeball curtains are there to help her see that the bad guy is in a place with guards (that is, Green Manors). Those eyes seem awfully weird and eerie to just mean "guards,". Who are these guards, anyway—and why are they represented by these big, staring eyes? It seems like you could read those eyes in another way. Maybe they represent guards—but they also seem like they represent those peeping, staring, snooping analysts who are the focus of the movie. Constance and other analysts are always peeking, prying, snooping, and looking for clues and signs. One of Constance's colleagues, for example, says of her, "Did you notice her blush every time we mentioned [Edwardes'] name?" So these eyes could be referring to the guards. They're also referring to the super-looking power of the analysts. But they're also referring to a third entity… the person who looks with the analysts: the audience. The whole film is analysts uncovering secrets as you watch. You see that Edwardes' signature proves he's not Edwardes. You see right through Ballantyne's skull into his dream. And you look into Constance's head to see the doors opening there. Those eye curtains, then, symbolize the viewer observing all the characters onscreen. And they also suggest that while you're looking, the film is looking back. It knows you're there. Everything it shows you as a "secret" is something that you are, in fact, meant to see. When Ballantyne muses, "It's like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing but the mirror," he's talking about his lack of memory… but he could also be talking about those eye curtains, which look out at you and see you looking back.
• The theremin-music-inducing parallel lines are a big example of a symbol—Ballantyne freaks out whenever he sees black parallel lines on white. When Constance makes marks with her fork on a tablecloth, he gets upset. When he sees lines on her dress, he becomes distressed. Edwardes was murdered on skis, and Ballantyne saw the murder. He developed a fear of ski marks, along with amnesia, it makes sense. But these parallel lines symbolize more than just ski tracks. The parallel lines show you how the film uses symbols and how it thinks about symbols. Symbols, in the film's world, don't have much complexity—lines on a tablecloth makes ski marks. The first is just a visual reminder of the second. It's a mystery because you don't know the connection between forks marks and skiing, but once you see the connection, there's an "aha!" moment. In fact, you could argue that the parallel lines symbolize the clarity and simplicity of symbols in Spellbound. All this disturbing, weird imagery has a simple explanation. The title at the beginning of the film declares: "Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear… and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul." But most importantly, those ski tracks, after all, ultimately symbolize death; they're the tracks that took Edwardes over the cliff.
• Hitchcock's famous for his sharp-edged weapons. And there's a possible foreshadowing of the famous shower scene in Psycho when Ballantyne has a kind of psychotic break and starts wandering ominously around Brulov's house with a straight razor. In Psycho, the knife is a penis substitute. The killer, Norman Bates, dresses up in his mother's clothes to murder young women. In fact, he thinks he is his mother, just as Ballantyne thinks he's Edwardes. Bates is feminized—and Edwardes is feminized, too. He keeps fainting, when he should be heroing. He's weak; Constance has to take care of him. When Bates loses his manliness, he picks up a knife as a substitute, manly, penis-thing. And Ballantyne does the same. The razor, then, is a sign of Ballantyne's castration. Ballantyne has lost his manliness, so he needs a razor instead. You see this again with those giant, ominous scissors in the dream. All these sharp, cutting tools are a way of saying they're anxious about Ballantyne's lack of manliness, and are thinking about how his bits have been (symbolically) cut off.

Notorious (1946)

• Liquor and liquor bottles are constantly used in the film, and have many different symbolic meanings. In the beginning, liquor signifies Alicia's self-destructive descent into a hard-partying life after her father is put in jail. In moments of emotional weakness, Alicia reverts to drinking more. Thus, the liquor represents the ways that Alicia is a notorious "loose woman." Then later, Devlin purchases a bottle of champagne to bring back for the couple to share with a romantic dinner. At first, the bottle symbolizes his love for Alicia and his desire to spend the evening with her; it is a sign of commitment, but when he learns that Prescott wanted Alicia to seduce Sebastian, Devlin absentmindedly leaves the bottle in the office and goes home without it. Here, the bottle symbolizes the way that Devlin feels that he must abandon his love for Alicia and perform his duty. Now that he knows what the mission is, he forgets about the romantic dinner, and by extension, the love he feels for Alicia. Then, when Alicia goes to the dinner party, she sees Emil Hupka point at the mysterious bottle of wine, who's later killed. The bottle becomes a symbol of Nazi plotting, a mysterious object in the house which catches Alicia's attention. When Devlin and Alicia examine the bottles in the wine cellar during the party, they find that some of them are filled with sand. Thus, the wine bottles at Sebastian's house come to represent the evil plotting that is taking place under the pretense of fancy dining and high society.
• The bottles of champagne at the party that Sebastian throws become a more specific symbol in the movie. As Devlin and Alicia make their way towards breaking in to the wine cellar, they are on a time crunch; there is not enough champagne upstairs at the bar to sustain the whole party, and so a butler will likely have to go down to the wine cellar in due time to fetch more. This means that Devlin and Alicia have to act quickly. Hitchcock turns the camera to the bottles of champagne on ice at the party again and again, and they come to symbolize the dwindling amount of time that Devlin and Alicia have to investigate the wine cellar. Every time the camera goes back to the ice bucket, there are fewer and fewer bottles, which builds suspense as the viewer wonders if Alicia and Devlin will make it in time. Like a party that can last only as long as the booze flows, the bottles here symbolize the fact that time is running out.
• When Devlin first meets Alicia at the party at her house, she insists on going for a ride, even though she is very intoxicated. They walk out into the night and Devlin wraps a scarf around her bare midriff, symbolizing his care for her. The scarf also has another meaning in that he is using it to cover up her bare midriff, maybe in response to her "looseness" or sexual impropriety. Thus, the scarf represents both the fact that he wants to look after her and make sure she is warm, but also that he wants to reform her from her loose ways and teach her to be more modest. Later, once she is married to Sebastian, Alicia gives Devlin the scarf back somberly, and the scarf comes to represent the fact that she sees their union as hopeless. While the scarf has perhaps symbolized her connection with Devlin in the past, it now symbolizes the fact that she is resigned to her fate as Sebastian's wife and doesn't want Devlin's care anymore.
• Apart from the fact that Alicia is a heavy drinker, other kinds of liquids and drinks appear in the film at key moments. When Alicia wakes up, hungover from her night of drunk driving with Devlin, there's a large glass of Alka-Seltzer water sitting next to the bed. Devlin's trying to heal her from her hangover, and the large glass is an almost unavoidable object on the bedside table. As Alicia rolls over, she is inches away from practically putting her nose in the glass, but she refuses to take her medicine when Devlin urges her to. Later, a parallel beverage is the cup of coffee that Sebastian and his mother frequently serve to Alicia. This is framed as a kind of tonic as well, but Alicia eventually realizes that it's actually a poison — the same beverage that's making her ill. Hitchcock keeps the cup of coffee in closeup, re-signifying the mundane caffeinated beverage that many of us know so well as a silent killer, a poisonous drink. Liquid and its effects, whether medicinal or fatal, are a strong motif—both visually and thematically—in the film.
• The key to Sebastian's wine cellar represents the tight hold that Sebastian has on his private affairs and on the Nazi-related secrets hidden in the wine cellar. He always seems to notice when a key's missing from his keychain, so when Alicia steals the key to wine cellar, she puts her and Devlin's well being in grave danger. Hitchcock shows the viewer just how important the key is to Sebastian in the suspenseful way that Alicia's theft of it is shot. She clenches the stolen key in her fist and as Sebastian goes to kiss each of her hands, she must throw her arms around him to prevent him from finding that she has stolen it. Then, the first shot of the large party thrown at the mansion is a steady pan down from the ceiling to Alicia's clenched fist, in which she holds the key. The key is a symbol of Sebastian's diabolical schemes and continued affiliation with the Nazi party.

Rope (1948)

• The film's most would definitely be the titular rope. The rope is the weapon that the two murderers use to kill David. Ropes are household items used to tie things together, but here the rope becomes a murder weapon, inextricably binding the two men together. It symbolizes the violence of which both Phillip and Brandon are capable. The fact that they can take a normal and innocuous object and turn it into a violent weapon shows the extent to which they will go to establish their superiority. The rope is re-signified again when Brandon chooses to put it in the drawer, insisting that it is just a rope. He then ties up Mr. Kentley's books with it, exerting his control over the evening and exploiting his dominance over the man. As Kentley does not know that the rope is the object that the two men used to kill his son, the rope symbolizes Phillip and Brandon's secret, as well as his own ignorance.
• When Cadell confronts Phillip about why he lied about wringing the chickens' necks, Phillip begins to play the piano anxiously. Cadell is made exceedingly suspicious by Phillip's tense behavior, and places the metronome atop the piano while Phillip plays. Phillip becomes more and more anxious about the ticking sound of the metronome, and exclaims that he cannot play along with it. Phillip is not only out of time with the metronome literally, but he is so anxious that he has become suspiciously out of sync with the lighthearted tone of the party. Thus, the metronome symbolizes Cadell's apprehension of the boys' plot, by revealing Phillip's unease and overwhelming fear. Its relentless ticking symbolizes the fact that it will only be a matter of time before Phillip and Brandon are caught.
• Light is used multiple times in the film. After Brandon and Phillip kill David, Brandon orders Phillip to open the blinds, which Phillip hesitates to do. In this instance, light symbolizes bringing their deed into view, literally "bringing to light" their murderous act. While Phillip is hesitant to bring light into the room, Brandon is not so worried about it. Indeed, he is almost proud of the fact that they killed their old friend in the middle of the day. Then later, at the party, Phillip does not want to turn on lamps at the party, further symbolizing his fear of being seen or caught as a murderer. Finally, when Cadell returns to the apartment, but before he has found David's body, he suggests that whatever happened to David must have happened "in broad daylight." The fact that the murder happened in the light of day signifies the murderers' belief in their own superiority. The fact that Brandon does not shy away from the light suggests that he has no shame about their deed. Phillip, on the other hand, wants to stay in the dark, suggesting that he is scared and ashamed.
• Dinner parties are sights of lighthearted conversation, a shared meal, and enjoyable togetherness. Everyone who comes to Brandon and Phillip's dinner party hopes for a normal evening, but the chest on which dinner's served is secretly hiding the dead body of the guest of honor. David's father, aunt, girlfriend, friend, and former housemaster all eat off the surface and gather around it. Thus, the dinner table—usually symbolic of coming together and shared enjoyment—becomes a funeral pyre. The chest is not a gathering place, but a tomb. The dinner party, usually an allegory for life and shared experience, secretly becomes a funeral, a gathering around a feast atop a coffin.
• After they murder David and before the dinner party, Brandon examines the crystal glasses on the table and comments on their worth. In this moment, the viewer sees Brandon's detachment and remorselessness about his horrible deed. Then, early on in the dinner party, Mrs. Atwater initially mistakes Kenneth for her nephew David. While it is an honest mistake, it alarms Phillip, who accidentally breaks the glass in his hand. The camera pans over to Phillip's hands, which are cut and bloodied from the broken crystal. In this moment, the broken glass symbolizes Phillip's distress and anxiety. He is so tense from the secret that he must keep that he accidentally breaks the delicate crystal that Brandon recently admired. While it is ethical for Phillip to feel so anxious about their deed, his anxiety is also what ends up revealing their crime. Thus, the broken glass symbolizes the way that Phillip's conscience and worry only ends up hurting him more.

Rear Window (1954)

• Rear Window's main motif is voyeurism; the title itself announces it. Jeff is obsessed with watching his neighbors, and even though he discovers a murder in the process, he's basically invading their privacy by being a peeping Tom who's armed with binoculars and a high-end telephoto lens. The audience becomes his partners in crime. As film critic Roger Ebert puts it: "The experience is not so much like watching a movie, as like ... well, like spying on your neighbors. Hitchcock traps us right from the first. As his hero, Jimmy Stewart, idly picks up a camera with a telephoto lens and begins to scan the open windows on the other side of the courtyard, we look too. And because Hitchcock makes us accomplices in Stewart's voyeurism, we're along for the ride. When an enraged man comes bursting through the door to kill Stewart, we can't detach ourselves, because we looked too, and so we share the guilt and in a way we deserve what's coming to him." Hitchcock wants us to take a long, hard look at how we interact with movies and where our pleasure at watching them really comes from. The lesson seems to be: choose carefully what you look at because you might get more involved than you bargained for. Ebert again: "We are all asked to join Stewart in his voyeurism, and we cheerfully agree. We lust after Miss Torso in one of the windows, and we sympathize with Miss Lonelyhearts in another. We're aloof and superior to their plights, of course—until the chilling gaze of the killer locks eyes with ours across the courtyard." Rewatching the opening credits, the shades in Jeff's apartment window slowly rise, just the way a curtain in a theater rises before the show starts. Hitchcock knew what he was doing.
• Through Jeff's lens, we see images of all kinds of male-female relationships. From the distant views of the squabbling older couple and the sad exploits of Miss Lonelyhearts to the close-ups of Grace Kelly's amorous come-ons, the film explores an entire range of relationships through visual imagery. Jeff and Lisa's relationship is the only one that gets dialogue and exposition; everything we know about the others comes from what we see through Jeff's eyes. It's amazing when you think about how much we know about the newlyweds or Miss Torso or the unhappy Thorwald marriage just from our glances into their apartments. One writer thought the film was really a story about relationships just cleverly disguised as a murder mystery: "All of the lives Jeff observes from his rear window have one common denominator; they all in some way reflect different aspects of love and relationships. They all have a bearing on Jeff's view of love and marriage." In this view, the murder was just a plot device for the development of the complicated relationship between Jeff and Lisa. Hitchcock gives us his final ambiguous prediction about that relationship using visuals: Lisa lounges on Jeff's daybed, but this time, she wears jeans and loafers and reads a travel book. Plus, once she sees he's asleep, she puts down the travel book and picks up a copy of a fashion magazine.
• Hitchcock's famous for his silent cameos in his own films. It's a Running Gag between Hitchcock and his devoted audience. In this film, he's the man winding a mantel clock in the songwriter's apartment; we see him as Jeff's gaze moves across the windows of the apartments across the courtyard. Hitch winds the clock and turns his face toward the camera. These cameos remind the audience this is a Hitchcock film. What's different about this film's cameo in particular is that he doesn't just appear onscreen suddenly and randomly. We see him because Jeff and the audience have been prying. In other words, he's part of the voyeuristic action. Hitchcock wrote in The New York Times that his motives for inserting himself into his films were "devious, or, if you prefer a more devious word, sinister. I have wormed my way into my own pictures as a spy. A director should see how the other half lives." So basically we're spying on the spy.
• Having gotten his start in silent films, Hitchcock developed a genius for telling stories visually. Think about the first few minutes of Rear Window: the camera pans around Jeff's apartment and looks out at his neighbors just like our eyes would, letting us know that he's a (1) award-winning photographer (2) who got into a racetrack accident and is recuperating (3) during a heat wave, which (4) is making the neighbors keep their windows open so we can see them going about their (5) pretty ordinary lives. All of that without a word of dialogue. Rear Window is one of Hitchcock's most visual films. It's about watching. He keeps the camera at Jeff's eye level, so everything we see we see from his perspective; if he can't see something, neither can we. Hitchcock never leaves that camera view except to show us Jeff's reactions. We are totally identified with Jeff's POV, never leaving his apartment and feeling as trapped as he does. When Thorwald realizes he's being watched and suddenly looks up at Jeff—up at us—it's terrifying. Keeping the POV so limited was a pretty bold cinematic choice that could only have been successful in the hands of a director confident in his ability to use images to tell the story.
• Diegetic sounds are sounds that occur "in-world": things like dialogue, gunfire, passing street noises, and anything else the characters themselves might hear. Non-diegetic sounds are things like the music of the soundtrack and voice-over narratives, which the characters presumably can't hear. From the beginning, Hitchcock wanted to keep non-diegetic sounds to an absolute minimum in Rear Window. Franz Waxman's score gets a little opening flourish but then disappears until the closing credits. The rest of the time, we hear only those sounds that actually occur in the film's world. Even more, we only hear them the way Jeff hears them. Conversations in other apartments are heavily muted, for instance, while we hear cars and other noises the way Jeff would in his apartment. This technique keeps us tied to Jeff's point of view. Just as we're only seeing what he sees, we're only hearing what he hears.
• Hitchcock liked to play with Freudian symbolism. Even so, he'd probably be surprised at some of the interpretations of Jeff's full-leg cast. Just as it makes Jeff powerless to get around or do anything, it's seen by many critics as a symbol of sexual impotence. Stella has already made some wisecracks about Jeff's lack of sexual interest in the bathing beauties he's been watching from the window—they haven't raised his temperature a bit. She jokes that he must have a "hormone deficiency." She's also wondering why he hasn't jumped at the chance to marry the beautiful Lisa. Maybe it's a fear of being tied down. Roger Ebert's take? "But perhaps his real reason for keeping her away is fear of impotence, symbolized by the leg cast." And how about this: "[…] Jeff's cast is a phallic symbol—long, stiff, and jutting from the body. Yet the cast also signifies that something is broken, weak; as Modleski writes, [it's] a physical impotence, but also a sexual one." Whether you buy it or not, it's true that Lisa is the one initiating all of the sexual activity in the film. Jeff seems completely uninterested in her. In the last scene, Jeff has casts on both legs—"doubly castrated". Lisa lounges around wearing jeans and loafers—she's now wearing the pants in the family, so to speak, while Jeff sleeps like a baby.
• If the cast represents Jeff's "broken" man parts, then the super-size telephoto lens is what he uses to compensate. It's the only way he can feel useful and powerful. Mere looking isn't enough—he lifts up this enormous camera lens to see even more closely. According to IMDb, the lens is a 400mm prime telephoto, whose magnification would make it almost impossible to use without a tripod. That's some pretty serious psychological over-compensation. Jeff's camera lens represents his work and his livelihood, everything that, back in the 1950s, made a man a man.

Vertigo (1958)

• The phrase "fall in love" takes on a double meaning in the film both literal and figurative. Characters are always falling off buildings in Hitchcock's film: Scottie's colleague, Elster's wife, Judy Barton, Scottie himself in his bad dream midway through the movie. However, the main fall, the one the whole film depends on, is Scottie's falling in love with a woman who's obsessed with death. This take on "fall" is treated as being just as lethal as actual falls.
• In a key scene, Scottie and Madeleine visit California's Muir Woods National Park. Madeleine is enthralled by the giant redwoods, but suddenly Carlotta's spirit takes over. She walks to a cross-section of one of the trees that illustrates all the ring markings with the dates in history that the different rings were formed. She shows Scottie when "she" was born and when she died. The trees, whose average age in Muir Woods is about 600 years old, are meant to represent the ancient past. They're one of the film's many visual symbols of the past, like the old Mission Dolores and Mission San Juan Bautista, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the graveyards that Madeleine visits. Even Madeleine's name is symbolic. In Marcel Proust's uber-famous memoir Remembrance of Things Past, the pastry that uncorks his 3000-page flood of memories was called a madeleine.
• From the opening titles to the bun in Madeleine's hair, swirly shapes (or spirals) are everywhere in the film. The camera swirls around Judy and Scottie as his mind goes spinning back to his memories of Madeleine. These swirls are like whirlpools. They signal danger. The policeman who dies trying to save Scottie falls to his death with his limbs splayed out in a spiral. The spiral staircase at the mission is a stairway to doom. The visual images all support the theme of the film—the dizzying distortion of reality when you're under the influence... of love.

North by Northwest (1959)

• The film's most celebrated—and sneakiest—symbol appears at the very end of the film, when the train becomes an enormous phallic symbol: The train entering the tunnel is meant to remind viewers of sex. But there's a less obvious—and much less larger-than-life—phallic symbol in the film as well: the small razor that Thornhill uses to shave after he finds it in Eve's bag. For the critic Raymond Bellour, this mini-razor's a phallic symbol that hints at Thornhill's emasculation: early in the film, when he's still under his mother's influence, Thornhill's not fully a man.
• At the auction in Chicago, Vandamm and his men bid on and buy a small Pre-Columbian statue, called a "Tarascan warrior" in the screenplay. Later we learn that the harmless-looking little guy's filled with microfilm, which is what the bad guys are using to smuggle government secrets out of the U.S. Hitch enthusiasts often talk about a "MacGuffin", which was the director's name for an object or other plot component that holds out a promise of significance that it doesn't ultimately fulfill. It seems important to the characters, but holds little importance for the plot. What's on the microfilm?
• One of the central characters is named Eve which also happens to be the name of the very first woman created by God. Eve Kendall has a decent amount of resemblance to the original Adam and Eve: She's Thornhill's helper; there's a little conflict in the relationship; they seem to complement each other; ultimately, she keeps Thornhill from having to face life alone. But there's an interesting image that seems to be a quick nod to another part of the Adam/Eve story. After Thornhill gets murdered by one of the Professor's enforcers, we see him in the hospital with a sizable bruise under his ribs. One way or another, events surrounding Eve are responsible for this bruise, and Eve is created (in one version of the story) in Genesis from Adam's rib.
• While running all over the country trying to save his own life, Thornhill finds himself in some very high-profile places: The United Nations, The Plaza Hotel, The Twentieth Century train, and Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock loved imbuing familiar places like these with suspense and danger. (He staged the climax of Saboteur at the Statue of Liberty, and he had his hero in peril at the Jefferson Memorial in Strangers on a Train. In interviews, Hitchcock said that he saw monuments as symbols of order, and he loved introducing elements of suspense and fear to allow disorder to erupt in these formidable places. Naturally, the Department of the Interior didn't want him anywhere near Mount Rushmore as they didn't want citizens thinking about mayhem when gazing on the faces of their great Presidents. Worse, they didn't want people trying to climb on the faces in imitation of the movie's action.
• When Eve sees Roger Thornhill's initials—ROT—on his matchbook, she asks him what the "O" stands for and he answers "Nothing". But once we see what happens Roger, it's easy to see that the "Nothing" can refer to Thornhill himself, who spends most of the film being whoever other people want him to be. His identity's up for grabs for much of the movie. Is he an ordinary business man? An infantilized son? A drunk? A playboy? A spy? A hero? He even gets fake-killed at one point so that Vandamm and the others consider him a corpse. It's through all the dangerous adventures that Thornhill comes into his own. Maybe after he settles down with Eve he'll figure out who he really is.
• Hitchcock knew about humans' fear of falling and used it in a number of his films, with North by Northwest being one of the notable examples: Vandamm plans to toss Eve out of a plane; Evil henchmen Valerian and Leonard fall off the cliff at Mount Rushmore to their doom; Eve dangles in terror off the same cliff for what seems like forever until Thornhill rescues her. For that last one, we see her face in closer and closer shots as we're sure she's about to fall. Suddenly, she's pulled up to safety—but she's now not on the cliff at all. The film sneakily cuts to Thornhill pulling her up into the berth in their train compartment for a little matrimonial activity. It's an abrupt and genius move to give the audience a 180-degree emotional turnaround.
• Hitchcock started his movie career in silent films, where pictures had to tell the story. He thought that something was lost in cinematic technique when sound arrived to films, and he said he used dialogue only as a last resort when pictures couldn't do the job. This film has two of Hitch's most impressive examples of this kind of visual storytelling. It includes probably the most copied and parodied scene in film history: the uber-famous crop duster sequence where Thornhill is dumped in the middle of nowhere in broad daylight in his tailored suit and he has no idea what's going on. All we see for six minutes or so is nothingness—the wide open prairie, no music, no dialogue. Then the plane starts to buzz around but he still has no clue about what's about to happen. Finally, it attacks, and the actor manages to convey all the panic and terror without single word of dialogue. The other sequence is the chase across Mount Rushmore, with the characters scrambling around this unlikely setting and nearly falling to their deaths. This is pure visual storytelling, using long shots to establish the scene and close-ups to convey emotion.
• Hitchcock loved the "Innocent Man Wrongly Accused" trope. He used the idea in a number of his films, but in this film he absolutely outdid himself. He gave us a guy wrongfully accused of not just any old crime, but the murder of a UN official. And the newspapers have a picture of him actually pulling the knife out of the guy's back. It was the culmination of Hitchcock's Innocent Man Wronged notion…and in this case, it also worked to put some boogie in Roger Thornhill's step. He's a bit of an apathetic character, which Cary Grant was very good at playing. You get the sense that this guy never rushes with anything.

Psycho (1960)

"She's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds!"

• Norman's brooding home — the Bates Motel, with his mother sitting in the window — is a very striking image. Against the modern America of functional apartment buildings, cars, and highways, the Bates house is a gothic throwback—an ominous reminder of tales of a terrifying past. Philosopher and Hitchcock fan Slavoj Zizek has argued that the house is a symbol of Norman's psychology. That leaning gothic mansion is Norman's skull, in which his dead mother sits and rocks and issues stern commands. He also argued that the three levels of the house correspond to the three Freudian aspects of the psyche. The top floor, where Mrs. Bates hangs out for most of the movie, is the superego. Mrs. Bates (and the third floor) act as the conscience, issuing commands and judges. The ground floor of Chez Bates is the Ego, the everyday self—where Norman is himself, the everyday dude. And then, in the fruit cellar, is the Id— the home of instinctual desires. When Norman carries his mother down from her room into the fruit cellar, that she stops being a force of the Superego (removed, set up with rules) and begins to be a force of the Id (part of Norman's instinctual self). The film is fascinated with the idea of multiple personalities. And Hitchcock even throws in a psychiatrist at the end to explain everything, through elaborate psychoanalytic explanations.
• Norman (dressed as his mother, Mrs. Bates) kills women with some frequency in his hotel, but chooses to use a knife off all tools while doing so. Then again, Norman isn't exactly in his right mind (or anyone else's), so you can't expect him to make the best choices. Still, symbolically it's pretty clear why he sticks with the knife. It's because of… sex. A knife, thrusting in and out of a vulnerable body, is a phallic symbol, bloodily and horribly miming sex. The psychiatrist at the end of the film says that Norman is aroused by Marion, and that his mother personality becomes jealous and kills her. But you could also see the murder as a completion, or extension of Norman's desire. He looks through the peephole and sees Marion naked…and then he comes into her room and penetrates her repeatedly. Plus, since the viewer's watching a suspense thriller, the viewers would anticipate the gory bits. By linking the murder to sex, Hitchcock is suggesting that he—and you watching—get enjoyment from watching murder onscreen.
• Hitchcock loves voyeurism. The dramatic opening shot of the film starts high over Phoenix, and then swoops down to a window. The viewer then moves inside, where they see Marion half-undressed after sex with her boyfriend. It's just a movie, but it's also very creepy… and completely entrenched in what is known as the male gaze. When Norman looks at Marion, therefore, he's only doing what the viewer has already done. Marion, first thing in the film, is presented as an illicit object of desire; someone you stare at lustfully without her knowing. It's them (or Hitchcock) who are in the first place guilty of looking through that peephole and wanting Marion. You are guilty, and so, to wipe out that guilt, and to deliver the suspense shocks, Marion must… die. After Norman and Marion have dinner, Marion goes back to her cabin, and Norman removes a picture from the wall of the office. Behind the picture is a peephole. Norman looks through it, and you see a shot framed in darkness (as if seen through the hole) of Marion undressing. The camera then cuts to an extreme close-up of Norman's eye, staring intently at the illuminated, ragged hole. Norman's eye here is also your eye. He's looking excitedly at Marion undressing, just as you're looking (excitedly or otherwise) at Marion undressing. Norman and you are watching together, which means you are put in Norman's place, desiring Marion. And Norman's desire leads to guilt… which causes him to stab Marion to death.
• Norman tells Marion his hobby is stuffing things — taxidermy. He's referring most directly to the stuffed birds in his office. But unbeknownst to Marion, the most impressive example of Norman's taxidermy skills is his mother's corpse, which is sitting in the window of his house. The stuffed birds, then, are a symbol of Norman's mother. Except... Norman is his mother, or at least he thinks he's her. When his mother's voice thinks to herself at the end sitting in the police station that she can't do anything but "sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds" — that's not really his mother speaking. That's Norman comparing himself to his stuffed birds. And what he's been stuffed with, and what is filling him up, is his mother… who now "lives" inside him. There are other references to birds, too. Norman tells Marion when they have dinner together that she eats like a bird. Anthony Perkins' performance as Norman is also pretty birdlike; he moves in nervous jumps, and extends his head.
• Norman's famously the one who's got another person behind his eyes. But the first person you see listening to inner voices is actually Marion. Several times as she's driving away with the cash, we see a close-up of Marion's face and then hear other voices — her boss, Lowery, her coworker, the client Cassidy that she robbed. The voices in Marion's head are a way for Hitchcock to let you know what's going on with other people—or at least what might be going on with other people—without moving away from Marion's perspective. The first part of the film is determined to always stay in Marion's head, in the interest of making it all the more shocking when the film moves to somebody else's. Another reason to listen to Marion's head is the last time Marion hears these voices when she listens to the imagined voices of her boss and the millionaire who bought the house, furious at her deception, her expression is no longer anguished, she's actually rather satisfied. Both Marion and Norman hear voices in their heads; both seem to find these voices pleasurable in a twisted way. Norman and Marion are therefore linked; they're both guilty of crimes, and while both are on the surface disturbed by their crimes, they both actually take pleasure in them.

The Birds (1963)

• Hitchcock loved working with blondes he could put through mayhem in his films. And Tippi Hedren was no exception. He once said that "Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints." One of the most famous scenes in The Birds is when Melanie goes into the attic and is nearly killed by a flock of bird attackers. She thrashes and spins and gasps, bloodied and increasingly panicked. The scene is highly sexualized: Melanie moans, shudders, and calls out for Mitch. Tippi Hedren and others on the set have said that Hitchcock was controlling and abusive in his relationship with her, and even pressured her for sex. The attic scene was itself extremely difficult and uncomfortable. Although Hitch had promised to use mechanical birds for the scene, Hedren had real birds tied to her clothing. She suffered cuts, injuries, and psychological distress that put her out of action for a week. If Melanie is being physically assaulted in this scene, it seems to parallel Hitchcock's own emotional assault of his star.
• There are several possible things the titular birds could symbolise. It's possible that they represent nature, red in beak and claw. Of course, we're talking about the destructive, awesome power of nature, against which we're totally helpless. Melanie suggests that maybe nature is getting its revenge; but, she's the worst offender as an animal abuser. In this way, the film can be read as an allegory of humanity's helplessness in the face of natural forces. That last scene of the very "civilized" Melanie being led like a zombie to the car, fur coat draped over her, says it all. Maybe the whole bird scenario is a stand-in for the future, when it will be machines, not nature, that run the show. Regardless, we'll be equally helpless as we become nothing more than slaves to destructive technology. This makes sense if you think about what was going on in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s. The film was released in 1963, just a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis in the midst of the Cold War Era. It was a terrifying time for Americans. Not knowing what kind of nuclear buildup was going on in the Soviet Union, people were building bomb shelters and seeing Communists under the bed. People were scared to death about atomic bombs that could come down from the skies. They could also be seen as Furies and Harpies, or symbolic of the distorted sexual dynamic between Mitch, Lydia, and Melanie, or the women and the chaos that ensues when Melanie arrives and threatens to disrupt the balance. The restless, aggressive birds are just mirroring the tension and anxiety that's roiling the relationships among the main characters. It's never properly explained by the film.
• Cages and cage imagery are everywhere in the The Birds. Not surprising for a movie about birds, but most of the birds have no intention of being caged like the ones in the pet shop. The lovebirds stay in their cage throughout the film, and it's the humans who end up being locked up. In their homes, in the diner, in cars—Hitchcock gives us lots of shots of people confined and trapped like birds in a cage: We see Cathy framed through the window after Annie has been killed; Melanie gets her own private cage when she has to hide in the phone booth from the melodious marauders; in the bird's-eye view looking down at the chaos, we see that the people are trapped wherever they are. They can run, but they can't hide. Some people have interpreted the cage imagery as representing a sense of personal confinement. Cileone goes on to speculate that the characters have incarcerated themselves in dysfunctional family situations that trap them in a tense web of relationships.
• In the title credit sequence birds are swooping and crashing into the titles, and the words shatter. This motif continues throughout the film. There's broken glass everywhere: windows, eyeglasses, phone booths, and more windows. Glass is no match for these killer birds; it's often the first sign of the horror to come. Lydia has seen what they've done to her china teacups, and she dreads what she's about to find once she sees the same broken teacups at the farmer's house. We get some foreshadowing of the broken glass motif in the first scene, when Mitch reminds Melanie of having broken a window during one of her pranks. Images of broken glass amp up the suspense throughout the film—when you see it, you know what's happened or is about to happen. The images add to the overall mood of the film. Not only is life meaningless and inexplicable, but your own little world is fragile and can be unexpectedly shattered in a moment.
• The lovebirds are a symbol of love. Whose love is pretty easy to figure out. Melanie and Mitch argue about the lovebirds right at the beginning of the film, and then Melanie delivers them to Mitch in Bodega Bay. As Lydia says when Melanie tells her she brought Mitch lovebirds, "Oh, I see." Melanie even wears a green suit throughout the film, mirroring the green lovebirds. The lovebirds are a great excuse for Mitch to flirt with Melanie. The flirtation isn't what it seems, though; turns out, Mitch recognizes Melanie from one of her court appearances and probably has no intention of starting anything up with her at this point. He thinks she's a spoiled, rich party girl. The lovebirds are for his sister; that's where his affections lie for now. But, it's not just about love. The lovebirds carry lots of other symbolic weight. They're caged, for one thing, and it's easy to assume at first that the other birds are wreaking vengeance on their behalf against the kind of people who try to keep them and other pet shop residents locked up. Plus, they're the only birds in the film that don't lose their minds and turn into crazed marauders. The lovebirds get a little agitated right before the chimney attack, but they stay inside their cage and don't try to bust out or peck anybody. They stay sane while the world around them, human and avian, goes crazy. We half expect they'd learn to open the latch of their cage, like those velociraptors in Jurassic Park …but they don't. Do the lovebirds symbolize some kind of middle ground between the forces of nature and the forces of civilization? Maybe they represent some kind of normal world order, where birds behave the way they're supposed to. Cathy asks to bring the lovebirds with her when they sneak out of the house to leave town. She's not associating them with their radicalized feathered pals. In that way, the lovebirds symbolize some small hope for humanity, some hint that at least something in this world hasn't turned against them.
• Most people in this movie don't see what's happening right before their eyes. Whether it's self-awareness or awareness of danger, they don't want to know about it. Numerous allusions to blindness are sprinkled throughout the film (the farmer's eyes are pecked out, the children play blind man's bluff at the birthday party, the broken glasses of the fleeing schoolchild, etc.), giving the hint that the camera's voyeuristic lens (and its screen-viewing audience) is also being subjected to assault. Hitchcock loved to incorporate themes of watching and seeing into his films, implying that we viewers were his accomplices in whatever was happening on the screen. It's a way of getting the audience to engage and react, being forced to look.