Perhaps, then, Hitchcock’s religious background helped him develop the narrative structure for his picaresque adventure stories. Yet it’s not clear whether Hitchcock felt that the ordeals he put his characters through were morally just. In the Tippi Hedren films, the audience is always meant to be on her side, and her transgressions do not warrant the punishments that befall her, nearly killed by birds in one case; tormented, blackmailed, raped, and suicidal in the other. In Psycho, Marion realizes the moral responsibility she has to hand back the money she has stolen—at which point she’s knifed to death. Hitchcock conceded that one could discern allusions to original sin throughout his filmography. But one might say that his films engage with the idea of original sin by protesting the injustice of the concept rather than endorsing its reality. The burdens carried by his heroes and heroines are given to them unfairly, sometimes arbitrarily; the fatiguing work of shedding that weight of paranoia, guilt, and shame is a waking nightmare.
To judge him by his films, Hitchcock was a man who believed in such things as good and evil, and whose mind had been captivated by the rituals and iconography of Catholicism. Yet God flits in and out of his movies as though communicating through a weak AM radio signal, as it seems to have done in his personal life. Many of Hitchcock’s heroes ultimately survive because they act as individuals—albeit ones who realize that individualism won’t save the day. It is by letting Daisy into his cell of internal anguish that the Lodger is saved from ruin; Jeff in Rear Window finds justice and happiness by putting his trust in Lisa; Michael’s noble mission in Torn Curtain is completed only once he accepts Sarah’s undying love. Hitchcock’s films suggest that the world is a baffling place, filthy and dangerous. People aren’t always who they appear to be; they can betray us and hurt us, destroy us, if they so wish. Yet they’re all we have. The best we can do is to be brave and reach out to them—something Hitchcock found very hard to do but had, sometimes, been rewarded richly for doing so, his marriage to Alma being the definitive case in point.
Perhaps he would have found sense in Oscar Wilde’s ideas on the subject. After his public ruination, Wilde wrote that sin and suffering were “beautiful, holy things” because they allowed one to reach within oneself to begin the painful, arduous process of spiritual growth, which in turn allowed one to form closer bonds with one’s fellow man. Though Wilde said this was an act of self-realization, not dependent on an unseen deity, he recognized the importance of Catholic materiality—“what one can touch, and look at”—in finding spiritual peace. He imagined “an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.” With Hitchcock’s strident individualism and his “trials of belief,” allied with his love of routine, spectacle, and performance, perhaps beautifully ritualized agnosticism was a religious idea to which he could have turned. God, in the end, was to be found only in the inexplicable mysteries of each human heart.
For fifty years, Hitchcock was the god of the universe he brought to life on film. At times, he was a beneficent giver of love and the hope of rebirth. At others, he threw down Old Testament punishments of plagues and avenging angels. No matter which iteration of the supreme creator he assumed, the mortality of his subjects was never in doubt. Nobody on planet Hitchcock was more than one wrinkle of fate away from the end—nobody, that is, except for the majestic instigator himself, who popped up for a brief moment in each film, seemingly immutable and everlasting.
In the 1970s, that began to change. In a publicity stunt for Frenzy, Hitchcock arranged for a life-size mannequin of himself to be sailed down the Thames, a floating corpse to signal the return of the “boy director” as he still liked to call himself. Four years later, the distributers of Family Plot attempted to compensate for the movie’s lack of bankable stars by putting Hitchcock’s face on the promotional posters. At the bottom of the frame, his disembodied head appears in a crystal ball, winking at us in reference to the final shot of the movie, but also, it seems, a cheeky acknowledgment of both his age and his apparent omnipotence—even from the next world
