It’s not just about birds: the other negative space in Alfred Hitchcock – cinematic dream vernacular and the phenomenology of fear
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Date
2013-08-22
Authors
Evans, Tara Jane
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Abstract
Foundational to almost any Hitchcock film is the idea of the voyeur: the (un)natural inclination to want to look upon the private, obscene, and potentially grizzly instances in other peoples’ lives. Such inclinations are typically satiated in secret and subsequently denied as something we desire. The voyeuristic act may be connected to narcissism in that we are seduced by our own fears and inner hells projected onto the watched ‘other.’ This kind of projection not only perpetuates our sense of denial of what are our own inclinations, but it also precipitates the potential for de-humanization and feelings of emptiness in that we detach from ourselves. The phenomenological paradox to such detachment is that the more we insist we are safe and self-enclosed here while the ‘other’ remains at bay there, the more we are convinced that we know ourselves and are connected to ourselves, when arguably, we couldn’t be more detached from ourselves and our humanity. And by not really knowing ourselves as well as we thought – as we might infer from a kind of ‘doppelganger’ or ‘doubles’ reading of Strangers on a Train, for example – is how fear is born, both in a Hitchcock film and in life generally. How then, might we come to truly know or face our fear if estrangement would seem an inherent quality to our very experience of it?
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Hitchcock, phenomenology, dream, vernacular, negative, space, fear, becoming, presence, absence, voyeur, voyeurism, strangers, phantasmagoria, birds, doubling, DeQuincey, other, otherness, narcissism, projection, watched, estrangement