A Film Canon

Like The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound charts the oblique, uneasy relation between Hitchcock's unusual vision of the world and that of psychoanalysis; or, rather, that of a combination of classical psychoanalysis and the particularly American form of ego psychology vindicated by producer David O. Selznick. As such, it turns on a series of gross simplifications and contradictions, subsuming all female investment in psychoanalysis - on both sides of the couch - into a general, amorphous hysteria (or, alternatively, subscribing to the fairly one- dimensional appreciative stance of Surrealism, as evinced in the spectacular dream squence, designed by Dali) and imbuing the therapist-patient relationship with both a hyperbolic debilitation and an unbounded, visionary potential, whose most explicit analogue is love, but whose more pervasive implication is that this relationship is little more than shared preparation of the conditions for revelation. It's this that redeems the film, clarifying Hitchcock's taste for enlivened objects - and the reconfigurations of subjectivity that they produce - as a revelatory version of object relations theory. Hence the organisation of all those objects around windows and doors - most memorably in psychoanalyst Constance Peterson's (Ingrid Bergman) vision of an endlessly receding corridor, upon getting close enough to patient Anthony Edwardes' (Gregory Peck) face to reduce it to its romantic constituents -  as well as the first explicit association of them with the body, in the form of the penile and vaginal symbols that take Edwardes back to the period before he found himself (literally) transformed into a different person. In this way, Hitchcock discovers amnesia as the ideal pathological corollary to his revelatory sensibility, anticipating Vertigo.