A Film Canon

 

 

In his most impressive film to date, Hitchcock not only continues to pursue the moment at which a character's perception of the world is radically reconfigured, but disembodies it to an unprecedented extent, primarily by extrapolating thought-lines from sight-lines, such that the house in which most of the narrative takes place brims with mental telegraphy, and the focus shifts from the reconfiguration itself to the dynamics of the mind that can prompt such a reconfiguration; that is, to the mental romance between Charlie (Teresa Wright) and her uncle, Charlie (Joseph Cotten), their semi-telepathic rapport sufficiently intense to render gifts redundant, collapse the distinction between childhood and adulthood, and make uncle Charlie's potentially criminal past both recognised and not recognised, as if Hitchcock's ultimate aim were to portray a mind in the process of fundamentally reconfiguring how it stands with regard to itself, and everything that has been repressed about itself. As twin movements of this mind, Charlie and Charlie give birth to an unusual proliferation of parallel movements - or, rather, movements that run the traumatic risk of ceasing to be properly parallel, most notably in the final scene, which takes place between two moving trains. Concomitantly, Hitchcock presents this threat to parallelism in terms of the obliquity of his thought-lines, which find their most concrete identification with sight- lines at those moments at which the two Charlies are lying on their beds, gazing up at the corner of their ceilings; shared mental staircases. From this angle, Wright and Cotten represent a supreme decision of casting, the former's screen persona predicated on the unusual texture that her proximity to evil brings to both parties, the latter possessing a proclivity for understated, disembodied speech that, in this context, approaches mentalese.