The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence
Vol. I, Issue 2/2017
© The Authors, 2017
Available online at http://trivent-publishing.eu/
Humbert, David. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A
Study in Mimesis
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017. xxv + 174 pp.
Alfred Hitchcock, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest film directors of all time, was
a master of cinematic violence, having crafted films pervaded by a sense of menace that
often builds to disturbing and sometimes macabre outbreaks of savage victimization. But, as
David Humbert argues in Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis,
Hitchcock was also an astute observer of human nature, whose dedication to his muse led
him to insights similar to those René Girard arrived at through his study of literature. The
subtitle of Humbert’s book, A Study in Mimesis, may refer to his own study of Hitchcock’s
films, but it could also serve as a description of any number of those films, inasmuch as they
constitute “studies” in the mimetic dynamics of desire and victimization, comparable in this
respect to the great European novels that were the subject of Girard’s first book. Humbert
offers masterful readings of seven of Hitchcock’s most renowned films (The Birds, Shadow of
a Doubt, Rope, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and Psycho) locating the source of
the conflicts driving their plots in the mimetic propensities of their characters. In so doing,
Humbert bucks the trend of much of the contemporary Hitchcock film criticism, which,
influenced by psychoanalytic theory, traces these conflicts instead to drives rooted in
perversely libidinous desire. Throughout his book, Humbert contrasts his mimetic reading
of Hitchcock with the psychoanalytic interpretations of such critics as Robin Wood and
Slavoj Žižek, making Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock not only a significant
contribution to our understanding of Hitchcock’s oeuvre and an excellent introduction to
mimetic theory (indeed, the range and richness of the insights it gleans from Hitchcock’s
films invites comparison to Deceit, Desire and the Novel) but also a revealing case study in how
the interpretative power of mimetic theory compares with psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic theory, especially as elaborated by its founding figure Sigmund Freud and
his famous French disciple Jacques Lacan, has become one of the most widely used
theoretical tools for examining the form and content of cinematic art. The films of Alfred
Hitchcock (built around such classic psychoanalytic themes such as anxiety, voyeurism,
obsession, narcissism, and the danger of disordered desires roiling beneath the deceptively
calm surface of ordinary life) have offered a fertile terrain for psychoanalytic interpretations,
so much so that Slavoj Žižek titled his 1992 edited collection of essays on Hitchcock
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). But if
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Humbert, David. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis
the films of Hitchcock can be used to illumine psychoanalytic theory and vice versa,
Humbert shows that this relation obtains just as much, if not more so, with respect to
Hitchcock and mimetic theory. Indeed, in his back cover blurb, Jean-Pierre Dupruy
suggests that Humbert’s book could have been titled Everything You Always Wanted to Know
About Girard (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Girard’s theory shares much in common
with the insights of psychoanalysis, yet it corrects and extends them in important ways. His
nearness to Lacan is evident in their common concern with the role of the other in the
formation of desire and in the rivalry thereby engendered, though Lacan (following
Alexandre Kojève) puts the accent on desire for recognition by the other, which Girard
treats as a secondary and derivative phenomenon. As for Freud, Girard regards him as an
important precursor to mimetic theory, whose accounts of the Oedipus complex and the
founding murder brought him to the very threshold of Girard’s own discoveries. However,
Freud never grasped the fundamental role of mimesis and so mistakenly assigned the libido
a fixed object (the mother) and antagonist (the father), failing to appreciate the underlying
mimetic dynamic governing the selection of these—but not only these—objects. One of the
great strengths of Humbert’s book is that it shows how much remains invisible to the
standard psychoanalytic interpretation of Hitchcock and by extension how much of human
experience it generally leaves unmapped, while revealing the power of mimetic theory to
bring sunlight to those dark corners.
Humbert’s discussion of the seven Hitchcock films follows the chronological order of
their release dates, with the exception of 1963’s The Birds, which Humbert treats first. “One
of the key yardsticks by which René Girard demonstrates the truth of his theory,” he writes,
“is the degree to which it illuminates key aspects of canonical literature that remain
unexplained or were passed over in silence.” (1). The Birds offers a promising test case, both
because of the huge volume of critical studies it has already generated and because of the
prominence of a number of themes central to Girard’s hermeneutic (the scapegoat, the
double, violent escalation) whose significance Humbert believes has eluded previous critics.
The central puzzle of The Birds, left unexplained in the film itself, is why the birds attack.
Psychoanalytically-minded interpreters typically consider the attack of the birds to represent
an outbreak of repressed incestuous desire or maternal superego, the catalyst being the
sudden appearance of socialite Melanie Daniels in Bodega Bay, with its disruption of the
relationship between Mitch Brenner and his mother Lydia. This particular triangle fits
poorly with the classic Freudian Oedipal model, however. In contrast, Humbert connects
The Birds with other aspects of the Oedipus myth. Like Oedipus, Melanie is both an insider
and an outsider, a figure of high social status as displayed in her elegant attire and manner,
but also a stranger to the insular community of Bodega Bay. As such, she is eminently
eligible for the office of scapegoat when the town seeks someone to blame for the
frightening behavior of the birds. The avian attack on Melanie in the phone booth outside
the café is the prelude to her victimization by the townspeople inside the café. Both
dramatize her selection as the scapegoat. Though the theme of the scapegoat, the innocent
victim, and the falsely-accused recurs frequently in Hitchcock’s corpus, Humbert points out
that The Birds is unique in depicting scapegoating as concomitant with a total civilizational
collapse. The role of the birds is therefore the same as the plague in Girard’s reading of
Book Review
Humbert, David. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis
ancient myths, the Oedipus myth in particular. It serves as an allegory for an epidemic of
mimetic contagion and the frenzy it unleashes, which must consummate itself in an act of
scapegoating. An analysis of The Birds that treats this social crisis as representing an upsurge
of libidinous desire ignores the many clues within the film as to its essentially social and
mimetic origins.
This summary of Humbert’s analysis of The Birds skips over many details through which
he builds his case, details that in their cumulative impact are utterly persuasive. One of those
details concerns the muted rivalry between Melanie and Mitch’s former girlfriend Annie
Hayworth. While most commentators are preoccupied with the conflict between Melanie
and Lydia, Humbert astutely notes how Hitchcock artfully composes a number of shots to
provide visual clues that Annie and Melanie (Mel-annie) should be seen as doubles. But the
doubling of Melanie and Annie is just one instance of a proliferation of doubles in
Hitchcock’s films (Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, Philip and
Brandon in Rope, Bruno and Guy in Strangers on a Train) which, as Humbert points out, the
director effectively highlights not only narratively, but also visually. For Humbert, the use of
these visual clues signals Hitchcock’s awareness of how mimetic rivalry generates doubles
and vice versa. But this attention to visual doubling is only one instance of Humbert
insightfully bringing into view the tremendous amount of information Hitchcock is able to
convey through the composition, framing, and sequencing of his shots and positioning of
his camera. The close-ups on the looks and glances that pass between characters in
Hitchcock’s films, especially in The Wrong Man, is another facet of his directorial style that
Humbert finds chockfull of meaning. The contagion of desire and other emotions is hard to
portray on screen, but Hitchcock does so effectively in a crucial scene in The Wrong Man,
where we are made to feel the escalation of fear and persecutory fervor through the looks
exchanged by the tellers in the bank, a scene framed in way that “emphasizes that their
desires are not autonomous.” (82). Whether libidinous or persecutory, the look in
Hitchcock’s films does not peer out from some inner Cartesian theatre, an isolated
spectator sheltered behind a peephole, but is rather one node in a wider network of mimetic
transactions that determines its direction and demeanor.
Humbert also breaks with many contemporary critics in his attention to religious
(specifically Catholic) themes in Hitchcock’s films, in particular the “transfer of guilt’ that an
earlier generation of critics had identified as one of the director’s principal motifs. For
Humbert, this theme is always bound up with the innocent victim of communal violence,
either meted out by a mob or in the more respectable but no less cruel form of judicial
condemnation. Melanie Daniels and Manny Balestrero, the eponymous protagonist of The
Wrong Man, each fit this description, as does Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson. Humbert
underscores how Scottie becomes both the victim and the double of Gavin Elston, his
wealthy and powerful friend from college, who hires him to follow Elston’s wife. Through
Elston’s adroit construction of the alluring but ultimately inaccessible faux “Madeleine,”
Scottie’s “wandering” desire is given an idealized object on which to fixate, replete with
plenty of obstacles to bring that desire to an intoxicating pitch, all of which part of Elston’s
plot to murder the real Madeleine, his wife, and transfer the guilt onto Scottie. Scottie
becomes Elston’s double when he later encounters Judy Barton, the young woman who had
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Humbert, David. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis
played the part of Madeleine in Elston’s charade. After browbeating Judy into transforming
herself into Madeleine once again, Scottie recklessly causes her death, mirroring both the
actions and the guilt of his own victimizer. Humbert’s analysis of Vertigo is rich and
complex, but one of his observations bears special mention. As he sees it, much of the
tragedy of the film lies in the fact that, though Judy truly loves Scottie and under less
tortured circumstances he could almost certainly love her in return, the subterfuges and
intrigues imposed on their relationship have choked off any possibility that they might find
authentic renewal and transcendence through a romantic union. Yet Humbert sees this
possibility of true love as a genuinely missed opportunity for the two ill-fated lovers.
Against those who argue that erotic hungers are always destructive and destabilizing forces
in Hitchcock’s cinematic universe, Humbert maintains that “Hitchcock sees desire as both
fallen and capable of transcendence, both potentially narcissistic and constitutive of
satisfying social bonds.” (100). This recognition of the ambivalent character of desire
accords well with a traditional religious understanding of the human condition, according to
which our present fallen state does not exhaust our existential possibilities.
Finally, the fruitfulness of Humbert’s approach can be seen in his highly original analysis
of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho, which, on a standard psychoanalytic interpretation, is the
story of a serial killer in the grip of an unresolved Oedipal complex. But what this obsession
with Norman Bates’ supposedly incestuous desires obscures is that Psycho is in important
respects “a tale of parental indifference and cruelty.” (117). Humbert invites us to reflect on
the real nature of the relationship between Norman and his mother, as we hear it echoed
down to the present in his deranged imitation of her scornful and demanding voice.
Norman comes to light as not just a mentally-disturbed murderer, but above all as the
victim of prolonged maternal tyranny, his mind having finally snapped after a lifetime of
psychological and verbal abuse. On this reading, which is consistent with the etiology of his
illness described by psychiatrist Fred Richman in the film, Norman killed his mother and
her lover not out of some incestuous passion, but rather because his perfectly ordinary and
understandable desire for maternal love and respect had suffered the affront of the
appearance of a rival whom mother clearly preferred over him. When his mind snapped, he
took on the persona of his former persecutor, with his attack on Marion Crane being an
imitation of his mother’s own punitive wrath. Humbert also astutely observes that
Norman’s attack on Marion mirrors the retributive fury of her boss and the oilman Tom
Cassidy, from whom she stole $40,000 in cash. Though the prelude to Norman’s attack may
have been an act of voyeurism, Humbert shows that the meaning of Norman’s violence is
ultimately punitive rather than sexual. As with the other films discussed in this book,
Humbert’s analysis of Psycho offers a wealth of insights of which we have here barely
scratched the surface. Perhaps one of the best things that I can say about Humbert’s book is
that reading it has greatly enhanced not only my understanding but also my enjoyment of
these films, bringing into sharp focus so many aspects of Hitchcock’s artistry that had
hitherto eluded me.
The remarkable fecundity of René Girard’s mimetic theory is attested by its fruitful
application across a wide variety of disciplines, from theology to economics to conflict
studies. But however well traveled, its birthplace is the study of literature and in some sense
Book Review
Humbert, David. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis
that remains its natural habitat. For Girard, great literature is a privileged domain for the
investigation of the mimetic vagaries of human desire, a place where we often encounter
psychological insights more subtle than most of us are capable of arriving at without the
help of great artists and their faithful mimesis of the human world. Indeed, one of the
strongest pieces of evidence for mimetic theory is how the insights of the great novelists
converge, each in his unique way depicting the borrowed nature of desire and the conflicts
it sets in motion. Girard never ventured far into film criticism, the notable exception being
his review of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, in which he bade readers to “think of cinema
as extending and surpassing the techniques of great literary and pictorial realism.”1 If the
realism of great literature consists in ripping away the veil of illusions generated by human
desire, then one might reasonably expect this revelatory power to be equally present of the
greatest works of cinema. David Humbert’s Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in
Mimesis shows that this expectation is not mistaken, demonstrating that for Hitchcock
“desire is … not like a Freudian guided missile but a kind of leaf blown in the wind,” the
wind being the mediating influence of others (102). What Humbert has accomplished in this
work should serve as a touchstone for future studies of violence and mimesis in the world
of film.
George A. Dunn
University of Indianapolis, USA
The PJCV Journal is published by Trivent Publishing.
1 “On Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ” in Anthropoetics X, no. 1, Spring/Summer, 2004 (first
published in Le Figaro Magazine in March 2004, under the title, “A propos du film de Mel Gibson, La
Passion du Christ”), http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1001/rggibson/ (accessed December 5, 2017).
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