Each of the twelve lives flits across the decades, making connections between Hitchcock young and old. The Hitchcock of popular imagination is dominated by his image at the time of his greatest success in the 1950s and early 1960s. But long before the creepy uncle of Psycho, there had been another Hitchcock, an impudent young urbanite of the Jazz Age who captured interwar London on screen and brilliantly exhibited ideas and impulses at the core of his later, more exalted work. The economist David Galenson once theorized that there are two poles of genius: the prolific, precocious Picasso, and the ruminative, late-blooming Cézanne, endlessly retreading the same ground. Hitchcock may be the only major artist of the last one hundred years who could convincingly be used as a model for either.
Paradoxically, but perhaps inevitably, this emblematic figure was a complete one-off. His public image, developed and exploited across multiple media, borrowed from Victorian aesthetes, Edwardian music-hall entertainers, Hollywood moguls, and the European avant-garde. He emerged into the public eye as a distinctively English sort of modernist. Steeped in a national culture of nostalgia and tradition, he pursued innovation and new technology while nudging elements of the taboo, the experimental, and the marginal into the mainstream. An interpreter of the modern and the urban, Hitchcock constantly stressed the importance of technique and process, using the camera, the studio set, and the editing room to play with movement, speed, and time. Like all true modernists, he delighted in undermining shibboleths, and shocking respectable sensibilities. He was a flaneur and a mythmaker, who embraced self-promotion as an end in itself; not just a filmmaker but an impresario, an entertainer, and the creator of spectacle, with his mythology at its center. The bigger that mythology grew, the more Hitchcock used it to tease us, with in-jokes, irony, and self-parody. By the time the cultural revolutions of the 1960s began, the modernist whiz kid had morphed into a wily old cynic on the path of postmodernism.
Though Hitchcock often insisted he was a very straightforward sort of fellow, his complex personality remains a source of fascination and contention. He had an enormous ego and fragile self-esteem; his capacity for self-disgust was equaled by his self-regard. While he possessed great surety in his abilities and opinions, he was in constant need of affirmation, from those closest to him as well as from the complete strangers who constituted his audience. He had an unmatched ability for communicating emotional experience, yet he displayed little conscious understanding of his own emotions and seemed to feel always wary of and threatened by other people. Hitchcock promoted competing, contradictory ideas about himself; he asked us to believe that he was both a nervous wreck and a man of sangfroid. He took pride in his refinement and sophistication, at the same time battling to control his appetites. He felt empowered and appalled by his masculinity. Although he saw himself as an ally of women, his name has become synonymous with male predation and abuse of power. He presented himself as full of knowledge, knowingness, and control, but he lived and died baffled by himself, frightened by what he knew about this world and what he didn’t about the next.
Such contradictions have encouraged astonishingly diverse interpretations of Hitchcock. The reading of him as lecherous ogre competes with the image of Hitchcock the uxorious husband. Hitchcock the brooding artist is countered by Hitchcock the vaudevillian. The dyspeptic misanthrope identified by some contrasts with the hopeless romantic that others recognize when they delve into the Hitchcock filmography. Since his death, these disparate images have grown like bamboo forests around Hitchcock’s name—but, in each case, it was he who planted their seeds. For decades, the question has been incessantly posed: “Who is the real Alfred Hitchcock?” At times it seems more apt to ponder, which Alfred Hitchcock is your Alfred Hitchcock?
Like the lines of his famous self-drawn silhouette, each of these chapters will contribute a different component of Hitchcock’s identity. Only when all twelve are seen together will the full picture be complete. But, at the bottom of each is a man and his obsession with every facet of motion pictures: color and costume, the minutiae of production design, the use of music and sound, the writing of the script, the intangible chemistry of a well-chosen cast, the transformations that could be achieved by lighting, and the magic that could be performed in the edit by the judicious use of a pair of scissors. “I’ve never known any man who enjoys making films more than Hitch,” said Norman Lloyd, a good friend and colleague. “It’s so much part of him. His enjoyment of it is an example of how life should be.” Whether any of Hitchcock’s many lives could or should be an exemplar for our own remains a tantalizing question.
* All three premiered in 1926, but it was not until the following year that they were released nationwide.
† Fifty-four if one counts a German-language version of Murder!, which he shot simultaneously alongside the Anglophone version.
THE
TWELVE
LIVES
OF
ALFRED
HITCHCOCK
1
THE BOY WHO COULDN’T GROW UP
A year and a half after the end of World War I, Londoners were used to ghosts walking among them. The absent were present in every street of the capital; lives finished but unre- solved, stalking those
