A Film Canon

 

 

Lifeboat represents an artful compromise between the demands of WWII, and those of Hitchcock's ongoing project of documenting the moment at which subjectivity is radically reconfigured. All the action takes place on a boat populated by the few survivors of an American-German naval encounter, localising and individuating the conditions of war in a manner that is alternately suspenseful and poetic, and providing a kind of epitome of Hitchcock's universe in its vision of a claustrophobic chamber drama drifting through a wide, ambiguous, unsettling medium that is ultimately continuous with horror - in this case, of a prospective concentration camp. This translates patriotism directly into charisma, imbuing it with a heterogeneity that militates against the propaganda element, and is encapsulated in the differences between a reporter (Tallulah Bankhead) and ship's engineer (John Hoviak), around which the other characters arrange themselves. More impressively, it transforms the requisite vilification of Germany into a surprise, or even a twist, as if to clarify Hitchcock's province of enquiry as the moment at which everything most feared, and even expected, comes to pass; or, rather, at which events suddenly, and traumatically, reveal the extent to which they were both feared and expected. Given Hitchcock's uncanny ability to render this revelation - and, more generally, the allocation of good and evil - contingent on the objects that disclose it, it may be that the ostensibly jingoistic, straightforward finale is merely an index of the dearth of such objects on board.