A Film Canon

 

 

The Lady Vanishes constitutes Hitchcock's first explicit articulation of his oblique, uneasy relation to psychoanalysis. When Miss Froy, an old woman, goes missing on a Continental train, everyone on board seems keen to deny her existence, apart from Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), a young woman who shared her compartment. In order to silence Iris, a travelling neurologist diagnoses her recollections as mere hallucinations, the effect of a recent head injury upon her subconscious. By aligning this neurologist with a malicious magician, Hitchcock makes it clear that these diagnoses represent little more than contortion, distraction and, ultimately, illusion. Yet he clearly has an investment in the "very subjective image" with which the subconscious is identified, rejecting the latter only to affirm an equally invisible, omniscient, subversive energy, in the form of the (partly unintentional) conspiracy of which Iris finds herself the victim. This finds most sublime expression at the moment when her romantic sidekick fails to notice a critical clue, despite the fact that it is fully visible to the viewer. It's no coincidence that this clue takes the form of a name traced on the railway window; or, more accurately, that it requires us to recognise the window's transparency as a sophisticated optical illusion, since this is exactly the reorientation it engenders with respect to the cinematic screen - and The Lady Vanishes makes less effort to distinguish windows from screens than any train film of the period. In this way, Hitchcock registers, but also resists, a relation between cinema and psychoanalysis in terms of their shared sensitivity to identifications of subject and object, and to a concept of horror that is subjectivised, predicated precisely on a vanishing object.