Relying on a deep understanding of human nature and psychological states and superb visual on-screen expression, Hitchcock not only succeeded in controlling the film, but also in the attention of the audience, making his film sublimate into a unique and unmistakable art classic while becoming a text that theorists were fascinated to analyze.
In her 1975 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, British scholar Laura Mulvey combined psychoanalytic theory with the concept of "male gaze" to put forward the thesis of film viewing mechanism, bringing gender differences into the discussion of movie viewing experience, which had a huge impact on feminist film research. Mulvey's ability to apply psychoanalysis to film and filmmaking depended on his return to Freud and Lacan.
Mulvey uses "gaze" to examine masculine pleasure in narrative films, aiming to use psychoanalysis to reveal patriarchal power in Hollywood films, with a focus on Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958, aka Ecstasy). The positive "male gaze" in Vertigo serves as strong evidence of the male discourse in narrative films, but interestingly, in the 1941 film Suspicion, Hitchcock used the "female gaze" entirely to construct "doubt."
The heroine of "Deep Doubt" Isina is a Miss Qianjin, and her husband Johnny is a playboy who plays all day. After marriage, Lina found that her husband had many suspicious things: selling antique chairs given by her father-in-law, managing her cousin's property but filling her own pockets... Lina is constantly troubled, not only suspecting that her husband has murdered her friend, but also more deeply afraid that his husband will kill her in order to obtain property.
For almost two-thirds of the film, the audience's gaze is entrusted to Lina's gaze. We look at a wife looking at her husband: Is he a murderer?
In the film, Lina suspects that Johnny is trying to murder her friend, she finds the wheel marks on the edge of the cliff, and returns home, the camera begins with a positive mid-shot of Lina closing the door and entering, with an uneasy expression and a nervous demeanor.
She heard her husband's whistle, and her eyes fluttered to trace where the sound came from. The camera keeps filming her positive expression until she goes around the stairs, and the camera follows her back to the living room doorway and stops. Next up is a subjective shot of Lina, a brief 2-second gaze, with Johnny sitting on the couch, bending over to check the radio, whistling. This was followed by Lina's nervous expression. The camera cuts back to Johnny again, and he sits up and speaks to the right (outside the frame). The camera cuts back to Lina's counterattack, and she leans forward to look. The camera cuts back and a simple pan to the right, and Johnny's friend, into the picture, is checking the power bolt. When the camera cuts back to Lina again, a look of surprise appears on her face.
This is a more proactive "gaze" of Lina in the first half of the film, because the miserly Hitchcock finally gives the heroine a few subjective shots that do not last long, so that her eyes and the audience are finally unified. Previously, although the story revolved around the heroine's observation, the picture was basically a close-up of her expression, her appearance and demeanor rather than her active exploration. On the screen, Lina is still a beautiful woman being watched by the audience, we are watching her watching — she is watching, but she is not seeing anything; and we look through her eyes and cannot see anything outside of her sight, in other words, we do not possess additional information that can judge whether she is "correct" or not.
Then, in the second half of the film, the important prop "glasses" appears.
Mary Ann Donne once argued in her essay "Film and Dress: A Theory of a Female Audience" that "men rarely seduce girls with glasses."
In "Deep Doubt", we see the first appearance of the male and female protagonists, and after a brief greeting, our eyes are actually staring at Lina with Johnny, played by Gary Grant. The camera first begins to shake up from the calf and stops on the cover of the book in Lina's hand opposite. The director gave Johnny a slightly surprised look and punched back, and then the camera shook up from Lina's book and stopped on her face—wearing glasses.
According to Mary Ann Donne, the image of the bespectacled woman is clearly a condensation of motifs involving repressed sexuality, knowledge, visibility and vision, reason and desire. The woman who wears glasses means at the same time intellect and undesirable, intelligent and arrogant, with a certain insight; but the moment she takes off her glasses (a moment that always appears, and always has to be connected to some sensual nature), she is transformed into a spectacle, an appropriate graphic of desire.
In "Deep Doubts", Lina's appearance with glasses did not exchange for the male protagonist's "love at first sight" admiration, until the two met again on the horse farm, Lina took off her glasses, she rode on a horse, wearing gorgeous and elegant clothes, from the middle scene to the close-up, this spectacle shot lasted for 4 seconds before and after, and then Johnny showed a stunning look, saying "It's incredible, she is almost like two people" - the love of the male and female protagonists has a breeding ground at this moment.
This shows the importance of the prop "glasses" in this film: Lina without glasses basically acts as a visual spectacle, so her "gaze" in the first half of the film is not powerful - in the face of questioning and doubt, Johnny can always justify herself, she actually did not "see" anything. However, in the second half of the film, The scene where Lina puts on her glasses appears three times, and her "gaze" finally sees something.
The first time is when Johnny's friend dies in Paris, the police come to the door to ask Lina if she can provide clues, she takes the newspaper handed by the police with the death information, gets up and squints her eyes, and puts on her glasses (around 01:10:00 in the film). The second time is when Lina learns from a writer friend that her husband borrowed a novel in which the protagonist uses brandy to kill people and disguises it as an accident, and goes home to check it out, and finds a letter from her husband promising that he will find a way to pay it back (around 01:20:00). The third time is when Lina begins to suspect that her husband wants to murder herself, so she peeks at a letter from the insurance company, and at this time, she also wears glasses (around 01:24:00 in the film).
In the film, the glasses worn by women do not always mean a defect in viewing, but rather a positive viewing, or even just a confrontation with the viewing behavior itself. Intellectual women watch and analyze, in the form of an encroaching gaze, pose a threat to a complete representation system. Through these three looks, Lina finally saw the "traces", which were the opportunity for her to suspect that her husband was killing for money, what Lacan called the small object a, and the threat of the real world to the symbolic order. These are the ones that run through the film and finally begin to stare menacingly.
Gaze – what exactly is seen
Vertigo (aka Ecstasy) and Deep Doubt give two kinds of gaze: a man's look and a woman's look. Both kinds of gaze undoubtedly bring suspense and horror, so what exactly does the "gaze" see?
Vertigo (aka Ecstasy)
According to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and feminist film theory, the symbolic realm is the discourse system established by the patriarchy, representing all the orders and rules of society.
In "Vertigo", Scotty almost fell from the roof of a tall building, and Scotty suffered from what the doctor called "vertigo". However, vertigo is not only a little afraid of heights, but physiologically produces a nausea sensation of shaking on the edge of a huge whirlpool. Hitchcock cleverly shaped this visual image by zooming in while stretching the lens. Scotty is caught in this visual trauma, split from the symbolic and imaginary reality of the rational world around him.
Scotty's trauma made him aware of the realm of reality in the visible realm (the symbolic realm), a "small object a", an object that most other subjects regard as ordinary things. The appearance of Judy in the later part of the film is a huge shock to the real world, a stain on the symbolic order, and Scotty comes into contact with the real world, which is the source of all fear and insecurity.
Correspondingly, in "Deep Doubt", although Johnny is not a "perfect" male (he is not the same as hitchcock's rescue hero in other films such as "Beauty Plan" and "The Thief", from beginning to end, he is still a member of the symbolic world, behind him is the great other A, the female as an object, the premise of entering the symbolic world is to be domesticated and become the object of fetishism.
In "Deep Doubt", Lina has been wandering outside this symbolic order, her gaze is like a small object a, and like The later Judy in "Vertigo", it impacts the order of the symbolic world, causing distrust and insecurity for the entire family and living environment. Therefore, from this point of view, it can be considered that the essence of hitchcock's film suspense is the impact of small object a on the symbolic world and the great other A, and the subversion and destruction of the symbolic order by the fragments of the real world.
Lacan describes divisions that separate the positive/negative, the emasculated/uncastrated, the pleasure/unhappiness, and the male/female, and it is Murvie who focuses on these divisions.
Lacan-style divisions suggest that there is a realm superior to the realm of symbolism and imagination: the realm of reality, which has an important influence on reality. This division is the result of primordial trauma or absence; on the other hand, "castration anxiety" is secondary, the result of a fear of returning to reality. "That's why," Lacan points out, "it is necessary to find the basis first of all in the divisions that occur in the subject in relation to the encounter." ”
Therefore, it can be concluded that the so-called "gaze" is the extension of the real world to the imaginary world and the symbolic world (the so-called "reality"), whether it is "the look of men" or "the look of women", what they see is the fragment of the real world, the small object a, and a major subversion of the symbolic order - this is the essence of the psychological suspense and spiritual horror brought by Hitchcock's films.
Like Scotty in Vertigo, hanging helplessly from the eaves, facing the void of death, like Lina in Deep Doubt, who faces endless suspicion and "delusion of victimization"—this is the embodiment of Lacanian "reality".
The effect of gaze
Although the two "gazes" in Hitchcock's films have the same essence, what is even more interesting is that they bring different effects.
In "Vertigo", the audience's gaze and Scotty's eyes are basically exactly the same (except for Judy's flashback in the second half of the film), the audience agrees with Scotty's viewing, the suspense comes from "don't know what will happen" and "why is this", but as the subject, Scotty is safe, and the audience with whom he identifies is safe, and we can see that at the end of the narrative, Scotty controls everything, erases the stain of the real world, and reintegrates into the order; and the "look" of "Deep Doubt" is concentrated on " After building up countless suspicions about whether there is or not, and whether to believe it or not, Lina, the carrier of viewing, is insecure because of the lack of order.
In Vertigo, Judy is defined as "guilty" because she assisted in the deception, so she is taken to the bell tower by Scotty and falls to her death, but it is worth noting that Judy's existence is actually passive from the beginning. At first she was subject to her employer, Scotty's friend Gavin, and then to Scotty (or her love for Scotty), and she was punished for her sins, but what about her accomplices? Gavin is naturally the mastermind, and Scotty is equally unavoidably known as an accomplice, but in the film, neither man is punished, especially Gavin. From a narrative point of view, both men are firmly in the symbolic order, like the Great A, who will never be sanctioned—the male gaze enjoys the dual morality of the symbolic realm.
At the end of "Deep Doubt", Johnny drives Lina home, passing the road near the cliff, the car door suddenly opens, Lina thinks her husband is going to murder herself, and the two fight. Johnny explains that he can't stand Lina's distrust, declares that he is afraid that Lina will fall off the cliff, has been trying to hold her, the two reached a reconciliation in the dispute, Lina finally believed in her husband, and begged to go home with him to live a good life again - the impact of the real world did not really subvert the order, and finally the woman returned to the real family, choosing to believe is also the choice to accept domestication, accept order.
This ending is full of ambiguity, because Hitchcock left a plausible explanation as to whether Johnny was the murderer or not.
"Deep Doubt" is based on the novel "Before the Fact" by British writer Francis Iles, but the ending is very different.
In the book, Lina is "an accomplice in the face of the facts", and she drinks the poisonous milk given to her by her husband out of her "free will" because she loves him deeply and voluntarily accepts the fate of the victim. Hitchcock once told Truffaut that he had wanted to maintain the original ending but added a twist: Before drinking the milk, Lina would write a letter to her mother explaining her husband's crimes and ask him to send it out. In the final scene, we'll see Johnny happily throw a letter with his own sin into the mailbox—which will be more horrifying than the ending of the novel. But according to Hitchcock, this ending is not tolerated by Hollywood convention, and they cannot tolerate portraying Gary Grant as a murderer.
This tidbit of the film may be regarded as the "mutual text" of "Deep Doubt" - Hollywood's patriarchal narrative discourse system cannot tolerate the real "bad guys" played by male actors, that is, it cannot accept the evil deeds of male characters being confirmed. Men who enjoy the dual morality of symbolic order must be heroes who punish, save, or forgive "bad women." The ambiguity at the end of the film "Deep Doubt" reveals this established order from the side.
From this point of view, we may be able to say that the two kinds of gaze in Hitchcock's films, the man's view of the woman, are the gaze of the subject, the examination of the object by the symbolic world, a process of giving order, mixed with action and possession; and the woman's view of the man is the gaze of the object, the subversion of the object on the symbolic world, which brings anxiety, uneasiness and suspicion, but the power is limited, or even powerless.
Hitchcock's films have long been touted by theorists, and it is no accident that he has been called the "Freud of cinema" precisely because of his deep understanding of human psychology. He may not be a psychoanalyst, nor can he simply be defined as a defender or opponent of patriarchal discourse, but the reason why the master is a master is because he can naturally and accurately present his own perceptions.