The year Hitchcock arrived into the world, Sigmund Freud was at work on one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Published in 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams decisively shifted the space occupied by sleeping and dreaming in Western cultures. Perhaps more than any other text, it carried Freud’s theories of the unconscious into the mainstream, making his ideas commonplace even among those who have never read a word he wrote. The lodestone of Freud’s dream analysis is his notion of a dynamic unconscious that whirs away in each human mind, constructed and anchored in childhood. Dreams, according to Freud, are the expression of childhood desires, typically those that have been forbidden or repressed. As the years passed, Freud modified various aspects of his ideas, and his conclusions were challenged from many angles, not least by his protégé Carl Jung who formulated his own comprehensive theories on the psychological significance of dreams and dreaming. However, the cultural significance of The Interpretation of Dreams can hardly be understated. Within twenty years of the book’s publication, Freud’s concept of dreams as a portal into the child-created unconscious had been widely absorbed, established as a major theme of modern art, and would become a strong influence on the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Many of those close to Hitchcock said he was very widely read and could talk with authority on matters of psychology, politics, and philosophy, as well as almost any field of the arts. Quite how much of Freud’s work he read is hard to determine. Freudian ideas crop up in several of his films, but usually in a rather superficial way—he was, after all, making ninety-minute entertainments for mass audiences. But the notion that dreams can help us understand the inner child that is the unconscious mind resonated with him. Those early memories that he cited as the origins of his anxiety—itself a Freudian-sounding conceit—could equally be mistaken for dream recitals, similar to some of those logged and interpreted in Freud’s case studies. The majority of Hitchcock films, for at least some portion, have a dreamlike quality, “oneiric,” to use the term favored by the academic critics. Characters, such as those played by James Stewart in Vertigo and Cary Grant in North by Northwest, find themselves dropped into baffling, nightmarish circumstances, battling their way through a valley of the uncanny—another Freudian backdrop—hoping to put the world back on its axis. When Truffaut noted this, he asked Hitchcock whether this was because he had a lot of vivid dreams of his own. As he tended to do when an interviewer encroached too close to the perimeter wall, Hitchcock poured cold water on the topic. “Not too much,” he offered; “my dreams are very reasonable.” By “reasonable” he meant a mundane dream of the sort that a respectable person would have; certainly no sex or violence like the dreams that haunt the characters in his films. Few who knew him would agree with that. About a year after he’d made that remark to Truffaut, Hitchcock told a colleague that he sometimes dreamed that his penis was made of crystal, which, to his considerable distress, his wife repeatedly tried to smash.
In narrative terms also, dreams, daydreams, and hallucinations are important to Hitchcock films. His fourth picture, Downhill (1927), features a sequence that he hoped would break the mold, depicting a dream in “solid, unblurred images,” vivid and intense rather than as something distant and opaque, as though the dream, although deeply odd, felt somehow more real than the waking parts of the film. He aimed for similar, discomfiting sharpness in Spellbound (1945), in which the psychiatrist Dr. Constance Petersen, played by Ingrid Bergman, uses dream analysis to help Gregory Peck’s character, John Brown, discover his real identity and clear him of a murder charge. Hitchcock recruited Salvador Dalí to design a dream sequence that would resemble one of his paintings in dynamic motion. After a close reading of the dream, Brown is able to locate a violent, guilt-ridden childhood trauma that is the source of his blocked memory. With the blockage cleared, his mental travails are ended, he remembers that his real name is John Ballantyne, and he realizes that he has been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. As if by magic, the spell has been broken, and the prince and his princess can live happily ever after.
A similar ending is found in Marnie (1964), the third of a triptych of Hitchcock films—the others being Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963)—that are built around a childhood trauma tucked away inside the mind of a central character, a loss of innocence that leads them into violence, waywardness, and emotional retardation as adults. In Marnie, the root of the eponymous character’s kleptomania, compulsive lying, and, supposed, sexual dysfunction is discovered in her nightmares. At the film’s conclusion, she dredges up a repressed childhood memory of the time she killed a man who was paying her mother for sex. As the long-repressed trauma comes flooding to the surface, Marnie physically regresses into her child self, cowering on the floor and yelping “I want my mama!” in the high-pitched voice of a little girl.
Hitchcock terrorizes children in The Birds.
The role of Marnie is played by Tippi Hedren, who also starred as the flighty Melanie Daniels in The Birds. Just before the first major bird attack (at a children’s birthday party), Melanie reveals to Mitch (Rod Taylor) that she is an abandoned child. “My mother?” she replies bitterly to Mitch’s questions about her family, “don’t waste your time! She ditched us when I was eleven.” In the closing stages of the film, she is savagely attacked by a mass of birds, at which point Mitch’s mother offers her the maternal affection she has craved for so long. In an earlier draft of the script, the point was really hammered home, as Melanie, like Marnie, regresses to childhood
