inkbluesky

quantitative experience 1600×1200

The Mothering of Evil - In Several Hitchcock Films

In North by Northwest (1959), two mothers manipulate Roger Thornton’s (Cary Grant) life. His domineering mother (Jessie Royce Landes) treats the forty-five-year-old man no better than an adolescent. But his truly more manipulative mother throughout the film, the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), plays with lives in a “spying game” and, at one unguarded moment, actually admits the agency is willing to sacrifice Thornhill to infiltrate Van Damm’s spy ring. And Van Damm (James Mason) iterates the same gamesmanship after Leonard (Martin Landau) is shot by saying that the police weren’t playing fair by using real bullets. Hitchcock also neatly comments on the State’s tendency to obliterate life and humanity for the sake of shadowy goals, especially in Secret Agent, Notorious, Torn Curtain, and Topaz. The task of Hitchcock’s hero is to preserve his/her humanity, as did Roger and Eve (Eva Marie Saint) in North by Northwest, and possibly find love.

In The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), the Mother as a malevolent force emerges in two variants. Mrs. Brenner (Jessica Tandy) clings to her son in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Mitch (Rod Taylor) keeps her alive, and any outside force to take him away is viewed dimly. So much so that the birds attack after confrontations with a rival for Mitch’s affections.

AS the author states at the beginning of the essay her look at mother figures in Hitchcock films is not meant as mother bashing, but “mothering” or more accurately smothering from a female or male parent can have less then positive effects. Remember also that we’re talking about analysis of characters in films, i.e. not real. Though characters in film can remind us of people that we’ve known in real life. A few years ago a young man was according to news accounts cut off in traffic - he was in a sports car and the supposedly malicious bad drivers were in a pick-up truck. The guy in the sports car weaved through traffic and managed to force them to the side of the road where upon after a few heated words were exchanged, then the young man shot the driver of the truck dead. A few days later a news crew interviewed his mother and she said and I paraphrase ” he was a good boy”. He carried a pistol under the seat of his car, he got enraged over being cut off in traffic - something that happens to me at least three times a day - he then kills someone - his idea of the appropriate punishment for a terrible wrong. Whatever he was, good was not among those qualities. It could as well been his father defending a son that last I heard was going to be in prison until he was about his father age. The consideration of this phenomenon in Hitchcock’s films is not so much overlooked as much as relegated to sub-plot, little details that help fill out the picture, but are not essential to it. The parent aspect is important, but the larger theme of ignoring and perhaps even cultivating evil and not realizing or acknowledging it is to me at least the larger issue.

Barbara Bush, on Good Morning America in March 2003:

    Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

Disseminate Information, Protect Democracy 

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a letter drafted by Nation President Teresa Stack and signed by her and her counterparts at more than a dozen independent journals to protest a sharp increase in postal rates that will adversely affect small publications. To learn what you can do to help, go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com.

This new postal rate system might well put at least the print versions of smaller magazines like The Nation out of business.