This is the identifiably Catholic idea that can be found in Hitchcock’s aesthetic sensibility: surface beauty is transcendental, a gateway to another dimension of experience. “Catholics live in an enchanted world,” explains Father Andrew Greeley in his description of the Catholic imagination, in which all objects—not just rosary beads and bottles of holy water—are sacramental, “a revelation of the presence of God.” Some of the most famous shots in Hitchcock’s films display objects that seem to be imbued with forces, good and evil, beyond the physical realm. Think of the moment in Notorious in which Hitchcock’s camera swoops down across a vast hallway to close in on the key Ingrid Bergman holds in her hand, or when Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant’s rogue in Suspicion) walks portentously upstairs with a magically luminescent glass of milk, carrying it as a young Hitchcock would have carried a votive candle in church. Strangers on a Train has enough possessed objects to fill the Lourdes Grotto: the two pairs of shoes that bring about Guy and Bruno’s chance meeting; the cigarette lighter that ties them together; the women’s glasses that arouse and enrage Bruno. In Psycho, it seems that everything from a stuffed owl to a scrap of paper bobbing in a toilet bowl hums with the supernatural.
Hitchcock with a nun (the actress Carol Lynley) during the filming of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode “The Final Vow” (1962).
Across the Hitchcock canon, various inanimate objects, such as scissors, eyeglasses, keys, and jewelry, crop up repeatedly, as though relics floating from one locale of the Hitchcock universe to the next, and all with the power to bring harmony or wreak havoc. Mrs. Danvers, the terrifying housekeeper in Rebecca, keeps the first Mrs. de Winter’s bedroom as a shrine, filled with her clothing, including underwear “made especially for her by the nuns at the convent of St Claire,” as though they were the Turin Shroud or fragments of the true cross. In The Ring, the bracelet Bob gifts to Mabel is a symbol of their illicit love—which Hitchcock agreed could be read as an allusion to original sin—that bores into Mabel’s conscience and that she attempts to conceal, just as other Hitchcock characters hide handcuffs that have been placed on them to restrain, punish, and shame. One might locate Hitchcock’s pre-adolescent encounters with the ferule as the start of his fascination with the artifacts of restraint and chastisement, especially ligatures and handcuffs, which he conceded had strong fetishistic properties. In The Lodger, Ivor Novello finds himself dangling from a bridge above the Thames, his cuffed hands above his head, both sexually prone and Christ-like as a baying crowd urges his mortal punishment for deviant crimes he has not committed. Like Bernini and his design of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Hitchcock stands in a long line of Catholic artists who relish blurring the lines between the sexual and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane. Yet this is another of Hitchcock’s preoccupations that speaks to our time perhaps more clearly than it did to his. In the early 1980s, when Donald Spoto published his theories about Hitchcock’s sadomasochism, it elicited twenty years of pushback by those who insisted that the Master had no such grubby fixations. In a post-Secretary, post–Fifty Shades of Grey world, where conversations about submission and domination are mainstream, Hitchcock’s handcuffs and humiliations seem less like one aberrant man’s twisted perversions and more like further evidence of his ability to point us to our future, with a nudge and a sly wink.
The magical elements of Catholic teaching to which Hitchcock was drawn were defended fiercely by the Vatican in the years of Hitchcock’s creative life as a bulwark against modernity—a condition that Hitchcock not only grasped but embodied. In the fall of 1910, the very season in which Hitchcock began his education at St Ignatius College, Pope Pius X issued the “Oath Against Modernism,” an attempt to insulate the Catholic faith from the insistent rush of a changing world, the hyper-urban and individualistic place that Hitchcock took such delight in exploring and exposing. The oath wasn’t rescinded until July 1967, by which point his decline as a filmmaker was well advanced. Between those poles, Hitchcock found a way to fuse the two contradictory traditions of the magical and the modern. He had a fixation with technique and precision planning, but this was used to create a filmic world that slipped the grasp of science, technology, and rational thought. In its way, this mirrors an experience with which many Catholics of the twentieth century could identify in their daily lives: reconciling the dogma of their church and the spirituality of their faith with the secular world.
When the Hitchcocks wed, Alma converted to Catholicism, just as William Hitchcock had converted to the faith when he married Alfred’s mother. When Pat arrived into the world, she was raised Catholic, too. As opposed to her father’s upbringing, it was not insisted that she confess her sins to her parents each night, but she did have a painting of the Virgin Mary above her bed. Her mother and father also ensured that she was a regular churchgoer and was confirmed in the faith. Among the lunches, production meetings, and sessions in the projection room, a space was cleared in Hitchcock’s
