A Film Canon

It makes sense that Hitchcock designated The Lodger his first characteristic film. Thematically, his interest in the middle ground between psychopathology and normality allows for a protagonist whose possible status as a serial killer doesn't diminish or qualify his role as sympathetic and charismatic anchor. Structurally, his geometrical proclivities find expression in a triangular motif that insinuates itself into various levels of filmic organisation - from the design of the intertitles, to the love triangle that constitutes the central point of the narrative, to the pattern of serial killings that enable the police to predict the location of the final murder. Nevertheless, Hitchcock's vision is ultimately incommensurate with the silent medium, just because his explorations of the psyche depend on a countervailing realism to achieve their maximum impact. As a result, the moment at which the disjunction between the two is clearest - the final twist - loses some of its impact, compressed into an intertitle. Admittedly, Hitchcock compensates by way of a pervasive focus on mirrors and glass (most famously in the use of a transparent floor to show the suspect pacing to and from from below), which gestures towards that enlivening of objects that, in his later films, conflates the psychic and physical worlds. It also contributes to his atmospheric evocation of a twilit, Gothic London, ultimately characterising the killer - or, more accurately, his acts of murder - as a foggy emanation of the city itself.