Les trous vers le surnaturel : usings on the supernatural element in two films of Alfred Hitchcock : Vertigo and Psycho

Abstract

Here follows an attempt at identifying any mystical traits present in the two magna opera of Hitchcock's canon. Vertigo offers immediate indication, but Psycho? Since much has already been written on these films - in scholarly and lay fashion, on plot and hidden meaning - I shall not poorly duplicate other people's excellent work and will therefore lunge determined into the issue at hand. A word then, of warning perhaps, on the approach taken: the material herein is highly subjective, and does not follow the strict regime of abstracted scholarly analysis. Such a formal scheme of deconstruction - say via Todorov's taxonomy of the fantastic, or through psychoanalytic dissection, or by semiotic inquiry - would have yielded a structure (with inherent content) which would have rendered itself to relatively easy transportation onto other films, setting up a formula with which one could mince Hitchcock's auvre into its basic essentials. However, as a filmmaker myself (if somewhat currently muted) I am of a mind to shun such clinical approaches; the same way the artist does not bear angelic fruit by following a recipe, I do not think that a treatise on the feeling imparted by a film ought to navigate its way to the text's (to borrow a semiotic appellation) bosom via rigid paths, but should float and flow on the nuances, of the encapsulated alter-universe hitherto created.