Invitation to Fate

The full moon was already tinged a heavy orange the night I went to see Shadow of a Doubt at the local indie. The forecast was for a ninety-eight percent lunar eclipse in the wee hours of the following Friday morning. Though not a full "Blood Moon," one would have been able to perceive the dim surface of that silver disc concealed enough behind the shadow of the Earth to mute its glow except for a crescent sliver along its bottom-left, the rest smothered in the red waves of sunlight passing through our atmosphere. Unfortunately, by the time my partner and I were out of the theater, a rain and gust had set in. Even by the time the storm had relented later that evening, the sky was such an inky overcast that there was no luck in being able to take a chilly peak outside to see our world's ivory bride donned in her crimson-black veil.

I do not know that I can explain precisely what that all has to do with Shadow of a Doubt, except that I simply feel that just as the not quite Blood Moon was hidden by that blanket of night, so too is there an occult meaning fixed in my mind and body by its juxtaposition with that film.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock and originally released in January, 1943, Shadow of a Doubt would surely have had no trouble stirring tremors of dread and melodramatic ennui by itself. Revived for one night only at the Princeton Garden Theatre, it was immediately preferable among this week's crop of new releases; and I have a feeling that much of my future film writings will tend towards revivals and "one night only" engagements of the classics.

Five months ago, when I reviewed Heidi Ewing's brilliant I Carry You With Me, I personally recaptured the elevation of the theatrical experience, a heightening of senses that comes in three stages. First, there is the anticipation and suspense of getting there; of getting up, going out, and going into the theater. I find it's best to be as "scenic" going to a movie as possible, that it's preferable to get in some walking and subtle people-watching. Second, there is the cinematic experience itself; the house lights coming down, the acclimatizing to the ambience of a particular theater and audience, the bottle-necking of senses into the film projection. Finally, we emerge from the darkness, and even the most banal sights and sounds explode in a pageant of rejuvenation, commensurate with drawing a deep sighing breath that radiates through every inch of the skin, the psychic sensation of the film cascading through the blood like a flood of ephemeral longing. Ruminating on any film, even a mediocre one, is enough to satisfy this underrated, even under-acknowledged, physiological bliss. But when one sees a good film, or a great film, this radiating play between mind and body is incomparably sublime. 

One should be careful, though. Coming out of a Hitchcock, particularly one as subtly devastating as Shadow of a Doubt, you have to be careful and attentive to your state of heightened sensitivity and the manic anxiousness that can come with it. With the rain beating down on the windshield, the blinding high beams of oncoming traffic, the threatening blows of wind suggesting to me that I should not be surprised if I should exit the car at the end of our brief journey to find the whole right side dented in; I myself became aware of how the lingering power of the cinema had cast me into a dangerous limen that demanded superhuman focus to preserve myself and my beloved passenger. I was reminded of regrettable episodes of driving while drunk, futilely assuming a monomaniacal objectivity that inevitably lapsed into my senses being swallowed up by that pageant of distracting sights and sounds, assured only that I was now adrift in some sea of the senses, my entire body and mind itself as one receptor that then dissolved from itself, out of my control. Something as simple as the spectral flurry of fallen leaves being swept across the road became the entire world, brief scattering red and orange before my headlights, foreboding chaos and evil.

This was the climax of the cinematic experience, and it means even more in a time when the new tyranny of home streaming dulls and dilutes our appreciation of going to a movie, as opposed to merely seeing a movie. To rent and watch Shadow of a Doubt on T.V., even in the most immaculate quality and on the most exceptional "home theater" system, can not deliver the spectator to the same pseudo-psychedelic heights, or lows. One must not simply see the film. One must go into the cinematic darkness, and be subsumed in its suspense and melodrama. The screen must be big, and the spectator small. Only then can its wrenching presentation of familial love as a delusion in the face of brutal human pathology achieve its complete, spectacular effect on its audience. One can not simply swipe through hundreds of possibilities and land on it like different flavored soup cans in a pantry carousel. You have to go out. You have to let the world and its chance beauty, and ugliness, prime you for the cinema's constellation of associations.

This is how it happens: You are driving down Nassau Street in Princeton, New Jersey. The night is alive with hundreds of people, the road is packed with cars. Your partner in the passenger seat says, "Honey, look!" and points to the sky above the stop light just turning green. And you see the moon hanging dead center in your line of sight, light pollution drowning out all the other heavenly host so that you can appreciate its face blushing orange, a silver-white glow just at its lower edge flashing like a sultan's blade, all in a solitary, regal glory. Though it is not a "true" Blood Moon, your mind says "Blood Moon," and though you may be a most skeptical secularist, you feel a pang of nostalgia for the idea that there is some tether between your soul and the vast, beautiful firmament of the cosmos; between yourself and the blushing princess moon. And you are going to see Shadow of a Doubt; and though you will never see the "Blood Moon" again that night, it will linger in the back of your mind. And you will find, indeed, that part of what makes Shadow of a Doubt so brilliant, so moving, so disturbing, is that it appeals to a sense of star-governed fate. You know that the two events of the evening are unrelated. But you also know that they are, obviously, irrevocably related, even incestuously entwined and embattled like the main characters of the film. The impending partial eclipse of the moon and what it seeds in your mind is what Shadow of a Doubt is about. You have not simply seen the film. Your life is now alive with that cinema.

*          *          *

The first thing to remark upon about Shadow of a Doubt is its novelistic pacing, particularly in its introduction of our teenage protagonist Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) and her family; her father Joseph (Henry Travers), her mother Emma (Patricia Collinge), and little siblings Ann (Edna May Wonacott) and Roger (Charles Bates). With a screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife), Hitchcock first cultivates dread and suspense. Before settling on the Newton clan of Santa Rosa, we are introduced to their estranged uncle, Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), in a small apartment in the East Ward of Newark, New Jersey, "napping" though clearly and subtly riven with a manic drive as he smokes his cigar, loose bills scattered by his bedside. The landlady says that two mysterious men calling themselves "friends" of Oakley are interested in talking to him. Oakley, of course, is not so keen on talking to them -- and though he hasn't seen his sister Emma's family in quite some time, he's soon wiring home that he intends to stop in Santa Rosa for an indefinite visit. We don't know if Oakley's "friends" are the type from the criminal underworld who see to it that debts are payed, or if they are G-Men in hot pursuit. But with Dimitri Tiomkin's driving, locomotive score, Hitchcock plucks at our nerves with the essence of suspense, as opposed to mystery. We know that there is something wrong with "Uncle Charlie," and sure as it rains on the just and unjust alike, we know that some history of violence is following him into the credulous abode of his meek and mild family.

But where Hitchcock really establishes his sinister footing is in this prologue's racking of focus. Though technically excellent, the conventions deployed to establish Uncle Charlie in his underbelly element are all too typical, if refined. The Newtons of Santa Rosa demand a less conventional hand, and one suspects that Wilder and Benson, with their backgrounds in theater and popular literature, provide Hitchcock and Reville with an invaluably quaint setting to toy with the spectator's sense of comfort in ways that are all the more deft and unsettling.

Santa Rosa is itself one of those preferred locales of Hollywood pulp, its idyllic pretensions just as attractive to the noir as it would later be to the drive-in science-fiction films of the following decade. Gordon McDonnell, who conceived the original story for the film, would have preferred the San Joaquin Valley, but Santa Rosa works just as well. Its semi-urban, not quite rural facade is, per McDonnell, "almost lost between the desert and mountains" of southern California. For all the city's lack of pretension -- the lively bustle and consumer culture of an American city muted by just enough pastoral nicety -- its enviable isolation from modernity's cynicism and vulgarity also connotes vulnerability and credulousness. These connotations are themselves imprinted on the Newtons, whose eldest daughter bristles at the "rut" of aimless inactivity into which they've run. They, too, are "lost between the desert and mountains"; self-sufficient, but inaccessible. They are, in Charlie's estimation, in desperate need of some revitalization, some libidinal inflection in their humdrum lives. Though "Uncle Charlie" is absolutely a real person, and well on his way to the Newton's aid, there is also an idea of an "Uncle Charlie" that is conjured up like bucolic magic by this teenage girl's sheer force of desire. The tension instilled by dramatic irony -- our knowledge of the real Uncle Charlie, and what his visitation portends -- is thus compounded by a sense of magical realism, by the fairy tale association of the "small town" with a dream world, where perversions masquerade as innocent wish-fulfillment, and banal horrors are papered over by naïveté and sentimentalism. 

Thornton Wilder, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Our Town, and Sally Benson, whose collection of 5135 Kensington vignettes had been collected into the novel Meet Me in St. Louis (titled in anticipation of the musical adaptation), are no strangers to picturesque, romantic allegories of the American small town; nor are they, particularly in Benson's case, ill-suited to crafting substantial, lady-centric stories about coming of age. Their contributions likely account for the almost gratuitous extent to which the establishing of Charlie and the Newtons is teased out in Shadow of a Doubt, and will surely come as a surprise to filmgoers whose familiarity with Hitchcock is concentrated on his works of the latter decade. Compared to the '50s, when Hitchcock's ascendency as both a director and producer assured a laser-focusing of his thoroughly modernist style, spectacularly efficient and increasingly morbid in its humor, Shadow of a Doubt stands out in retrospect as a film where, early on, the setting is defined around the quirks of social and interpersonal life, rather than the stylization of aesthetic forms, including the forms of human bodies and expressions. Even the stabs at black humor in Shadow of a Doubt seem organically derived from an understanding of the characters' subjectivity, rather than cosmic jokes at their expense. Maybe that's why young Charlie's epiphany -- that Uncle Charlie is just the hero to rescue the Newtons, and her especially, from their miserable, go-nowhere plight -- not only enhances our suspense, but also deeply effects our sense that something is deeply wrong, something that merely the sight of shallow Uncle Charlie or the sound of Tiomkin's score can not approach or convey.

It is not only the dramatic irony of knowing that the man the Newtons are about to receive is bringing destruction with him. It is the mortifying sight of Charlie and mother Emma's ecstatic faces when they realize that, yes, Uncle Charlie is coming home! It is the cognitive dissonance created by Hitchcock's establishing of Uncle Charlie juxtaposed with the establishing of the Newtons, twisting us into knots because there is an identifiable naturalism to the latter that is then undermined by their joyous embracing of the very things we dread for them in the former.

Not merely in sinful deed, but, more importantly, in sinful thought, the extent to which characters seem to invite their undoing was already and would continue to be a key theme of Hitchcock's cinema. He and Reville predictably layer the Newton's cringing invitation of the macabre with allusions to the psychosexual. Charlie's exuberance of emotion at the imaginary of her Uncle suggests nothing short of incestuous desire, the projection onto this hero of her youth a model for the ideal romantic partner, a veritable fairy tale prince to rescue her from the dark tower of teenage angst and repression. Even without this, the disturbing undercurrent of Shadow of a Doubt would still be sufficiently metaphysical. And here we come to the truly ingenious aspect of the film's opening. I do not know that I am more inclined to credit this idea to Hitchcock and Reville's penchant for twisted humor, or to one of either Wilder or Benson's more inspired contributions. At any rate, here is what sells the full horrific dimensions of the story: That much of our establishing of the Newton family is given over to Charlie's sudden, determined, even manic effort to send her Uncle Charlie a telegram inviting him home, while at the same time we know, and her mother is about to learn, that Uncle Charlie is already on his way.

One wonders if Hitchcock had to fight for this inclusion, given that it might, on paper, seem to mire the pacing of the film in something that ultimately goes nowhere, when introducing the family and simply having them learn about Uncle Charlie's telegram would have sufficed. Perhaps producer Jack H. Skirball -- previously an associate on Hitchcock's Saboteur -- realized the necessity of this prolonged opening in concretely establishing Charlie's naive obsession with her uncle and furthering the film's suspense. Whatever the case, this otherwise gratuitous "twist of fate" in the film's prologue conveys succinctly that Shadow of a Doubt is, in essence, a tragedy of fate. The narrative is not governed merely by logically connected actions. One is forced to conclude that the timing of Uncle Charlie's decision to come home and Charlie's decision to invite him home is no mere coincidence or serendipity. The same animal instinct to evade the former's pursuers seems to be directly connected to the rise in the latter's manic energy to a feverish pitch. There is, indeed, a magnetic pull across a metaphysical plane between Charlie and her Uncle. Our own suspense, our own terror, is thus neatly inscribed in the notion of the characters' complete lack of agency. Something else, something more perfidious and cruel than a mere mortal, is pulling the strings.

*          *          *

I am doing my best to not give away the twist, as to what is "wrong" with Uncle Charlie. Such errands may be all but futile, particularly with regards to classic films, in a time where anyone can look up a plot synopsis on Wikipedia or watch the "best bits" of any given film on YouTube. I will say, however, that the situation may not be as bad as all that. Even with an auteur as prolific as Hitchcock, it is pleasing to note how many viewers remain effectively "unspoiled" on his works. Even with the example of Psycho, we may all have the "shower scene" embedded in our brains via cultural osmosis, but it is pleasing to see, in the new genre of the "reaction video," for example, how few viewers, even so called "movie buffs," are unprepared for the scene's power in context and, more importantly, how few of them anticipate that macabre final twist that the director felt compelled to structure his advertisement campaign around encouraging patrons to not spoil for others.

In the case of Shadow of a Doubt, it is interesting that one can actually write very much about the film, while only gesturing at the premise that the real Uncle Charlie is far and away from the hero that inspires Charlie and her mother Emma to get all misty-eyed at his arrival. The concerns of the film remain largely melodramatic in nature. One could even say that, much like the coded tune from The 39 Steps or the microfilm in North by Northwest, Uncle Charlie's specific misdeeds are a kind of "MacGuffin," a plot device that becomes a point of obsession for the gradually disillusioned young Charlie, but which is itself incidental to the film and its themes. It is not what Uncle Charlie did that is particularly fascinating or important, but rather the gravity of difference between the "real" Uncle Charlie and the larger-than-life figure built up in the imaginary of Charlie and her mother.

I have already written that the sense of metaphysical dread the film inspires does not necessarily depend upon Hitchcock and Reville's eye for the psychosexual. This is not to say, however, that this element is unimportant. Indeed, it is not enough to say that Wright's performance, and how Hitchcock stages her relationship with Cotten as Uncle Charlie, is informed by the love of a niece for an uncle. It is fair to say that Charlie is very much in love with her uncle, that the manic inspiration to summon him is heavily coded by romantic and sexual desire. Hitchcock, never one for too much subtlety, ensures our total discomfort with the relationship between the two when, baring gifts for the family -- a watch for Joseph, a scarf for Emma -- Uncle Charlie saves an emerald ring for his favored niece, suggesting nothing short of an incestuous engagement between the two. This ring is another of Hitchcock's patented MacGuffins, one of several deployed effectively throughout the narrative as the filmmaker aims to orient our unease, not around Uncle Charlie's actions, but rather around Charlie and her mother's reactions. When Charlie perceives an inscription on the inside of the band -- "T.S. from B.M." -- the unimpeded romantic serenade of Tiomkin's score complements the lovestruck teenager's willingness to overlook this "red flag" in favor of not merely charity towards Uncle Charlie's intentions, but more so in favor of an unimpeachable portrait of the man before her. Uncle Charlie's estranged presentation of himself, credulously echoed by Emma's mythologizing of her brother, as a stridently successful man of ill-defined "business" -- one who has a good $40,000 in notes to open a bank account in Santa Rosa -- is not intruded upon by the reality that, at a bare minimum, he has had to buy his gifts second hand, and has poorly concealed their origins to save face. To say that it is love that blinds Charlie and her mother to the shallowness of Uncle Charlie's affect doesn't quite pin down why Shadow of a Doubt is rendered so effortlessly disquieting on Hitchcock's part. This is a conception of love bordering upon total delusion.

Lacking the same psychosexual connotations, it is the love of a sister for a younger brother that proves all the more disturbingly emphatic. Connected across some metaphysical plane, there is an extent to which Uncle Charlie let's his mask slip in Charlie's presence, as if he assumes that his true nature will not repulse, but arouse her, inflame her passion by a shared sense of their superiority in this small, go-nowhere town and its pathetic, go-nowhere people. Or perhaps he simply revels in the extent to which Joseph's contentment in going along to get along, and Emma's entrenched infatuation with the idea of her brother, means that he can be more comfortable in his own skin, enjoying how bad he can be without it negating the social and interpersonal interpretation of his character. As Charlie's crowning knowledge of the wolf among this herd of sheep grows, horror mounts through our sense of Emma's own pathology of denial. She, too, is overlooking the "red flags" of Uncle Charlie's behavior, though for reasons that, because her subjectivity is not the perspective of the story, are made all the more lonely and devastating. Her brother must be her hero, too, to a degree that is equal to the traumatic reality of why they have become so estranged, why he left her alone. For as much as she must love her brother, he does not love her. He is, indeed, incapable of loving her; incapable of love for anyone but himself.

Hence, the brutal effectiveness of Shadow of a Doubt, less as a thriller, and more as a melodramatic tragedy. In a filmography of many good and some great films, Shadow of a Doubt is still a singular experience in Hitchcock's oeuvre, in that it is one of his most invested in conveying the profound lack of continuity between what we desire of the world, and other people, and what the material reality of the world, and the often evil extremes of human psychology, have to offer us. Here, he masterfully derives suspense and horror from the metaphysical connection between the two, how our credulous desires manifest and invite our own exploitation. Hitchcock's signature preoccupation with the perverse and psychosexual is inarguable, which inevitably tips the scales of our emotional interpretation of the film in favor of a sense of the filmmakers' puritanical misanthropy, and, further, with his focus on women, of his puritanical misogyny. By inviting Uncle Charlie, by manifesting him from her desires, Charlie becomes metaphysically responsible for what happens to her, inviting punishment for her desires. Even so, Shadow of a Doubt is distinguished among Hitchcock's films, particularly his later ones, by a greater investment and understanding of his characters' experiences as allegorical of the human condition. Perhaps we are doomed not just by our most sinful desires, but merely by our need to be loved at all. Perhaps we invite fate because we want to believe, despite all evidence, that people are essentially good.

The tragedy is that it takes so little to love, even to love unconditionally, because love is simply one of those endemic, often irrational facets of human nature. Yet, for as little as it takes to love, what it can cost us can be quite great indeed.