What Hitchcock whispered in his own prayers, or what sins he might have felt moved to confess, is unknown. He spoke publicly about his Catholic background but rarely gave any indication as to the precise nature of his beliefs. One of the many areas in which he surprised and disappointed André Bazin when they met was the director’s inability to unpick what Bazin thought were the obviously Catholic themes of his films: guilt, shame, penitence, and vengeance. Bazin floated the idea that the Hitchcock universe was governed by a Jansenist God. “What’s a Jansenist?” asked Hitchcock. The answer is a Catholic who subscribes to the austere ideas of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, who focused on original sin, predestination, and the depravities of the flesh. Jansenism thrived in Ireland after the famines of the mid-nineteenth century, communicating a disgust for bodily functions and stressing the need to repress sexual urges. One can see why Bazin detected a strain of Jansen in Hitchcock. Bad things almost always befall the unchaste and immodest in his movies, and in his own life he went out of his way to claim—unconvincingly—that away from filmmaking he had no interest in sex, and he boasted about the white, gleaming cleanliness of his home bathroom, which looked perpetually unused. As a matter of routine, he would use paper towels to dry a sink once he had washed his hands, lest any trace of his body be left in that place of unmentionable activities. For similar reasons, he would always lift his feet off the floor if he were forced to use a public toilet cubicle. Embarrassment about bodily functions is far from a Jansenist preserve, however, and, as Patrick McGilligan has pointed out, it could as easily be labeled an English pathology, the flip side of a scatological sense of humor, something Hitchcock also possessed. In any event, Jansenist severity only goes so far in Hitchcock, who spent at least as much of his life celebrating fleshly indulgences as he did denying them; he was a voluptuary and an aesthete, the wearer of silk pajamas and tailored suits, not burlap and hair shirts.
About the closest Hitchcock ever got to expressing his own sense of faith was in a brief interview with the St Ignatius College magazine in the 1970s. When asked whether he was religious, Hitchcock suggested that though he considered himself a Catholic, he was not necessarily a man of God. “[A] claim to be religious rests entirely on your own conscience, whether you believe or not. A Catholic attitude was indoctrinated into me. After all, I was born a Catholic, I went to a Catholic school, and I now have a conscience with lots of trials over belief.” Considering that the interviewer was a teenage schoolboy, it’s forgivable that this enticing morsel was not pursued; the follow-up question was about Hitchcock’s love of maps.
What did he mean by “trials over belief”? Did he lie awake at night plagued by worries for his eternal soul? Did he question how God could exist in a world of such arbitrary injustice and pervasive cruelty, that subtext of his darkest films? Were the images of violence and sadism that he projected from his mind onto our screens a reflection of his belief in man’s inherent evil? Could he find the strength to admit to his priest things about himself that he said he found impossible to tell a psychiatrist, a friend, Alma, or even himself?
The definitive answers to those questions went with Hitchcock’s ashes into the Pacific Ocean, and perhaps into a realm beyond our own. But many of those who worked with him—in particular, his writers—believe that Hitchcock, consciously or not, used his films as a means of “concocting a moral vision of the universe,” one in which evil doers are exposed and punished, and almost everyone is in need of expiation for something. In a gloomy frame of mind in old age, he told an interviewer that “today to a great extent evil has spread, every little town has had its share of evil,” although why that had happened or when it started, he didn’t say. In this world of ever-present wrongdoing, guilt can appear to be contagious, passed from one sinner to the next as easily as the common cold. “Transference of guilt” is what some critics call it, and it’s supposedly observable in manifold places: in Dial M for Murder and Blackmail, when the female protagonists inadvertently kill men who are attacking them; in Shadow of a Doubt, when young Charlie absorbs the guilt of Uncle Charlie, her “twin”; in Strangers on a Train, when Bruno commits a horrific crime that appalls Guy but that he has secretly willed. There are even readings of North by Northwest that state the hellish absurdity into which Roger Thornhill falls is cosmic payback for his stealing a cab in the opening scene.
This would be to mistake harlequinade irony for theological severity. Ambiguity in all things was Hitchcock’s preferred way of looking at the world, but his films don’t equate the violence of rape and murder with the violence of self-defense, nor small acts of selfishness with psychopathic thuggery and unpleasant thoughts with unpleasant acts. The feeling of guilt sloshes around the Hitchcock universe; it envelops his characters the way the swamp claims Marion Crane’s car—slowly, inexorably, completely. Yet this is because the human conscience is a punishing taskmaster, especially among the goodhearted and the God-fearing. It’s Hitchcock’s supreme joke that the men and women most burdened by their conscience tend to be those with the least to feel guilty about. Perhaps that’s how he felt about himself.
Whether it’s Barry Kane’s struggle to maintain his freedom and his faith
