Do Hitchcock's films suffer from 'too much Freud?'

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That's the assessment made by an acquaintance of mine, and well, I guess I can see her point. Hitchcock had a penchant for reducing complex characters like Marnie and Anthony Bates to comfortable psychoanalytical sound bites. Any thoughts?

― Anthony (Anthony F), Monday, 28 February 2005 05:42 (twenty-one years ago)

Hitchcock admired Schopenhauer very much too, and it's pretty easy to interpret his films as schopenhauer/freudian parables. (the music theme in vertigo, for instance, is straight schopenhauer). i think the schopenhauer aspect, however, saves it most of his films from pat psychoanalysis because it presents a radical, almost metaphysical, kind of evil.

havent see marnie, though. hitchcock's view of the world is too metaphyscial and perverse for his films to ever really be reductive i think. the birds mocks attempts to make meaning from the inexplicabale, psycho is perhaps less hard to defend in that respect.

― ryan (ryan), Monday, 28 February 2005 05:52 (twenty-one years ago)

in other words, for the most part he avoids just doing Freud on film because he is just using the tropes of psychoanalysis for his own ends. again, i havent seen Marnie, which would seem by its reputation to be the main culprit here.

― ryan (ryan), Monday, 28 February 2005 06:00 (twenty-one years ago)

Ask Slavoj.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 28 February 2005 06:45 (twenty-one years ago)

PS - Wot's the concensus take on psychoanalysis in Spellbound? Seems a bit like the old stereotype of how much psychoanalysis "can" actually read into things.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 28 February 2005 06:46 (twenty-one years ago)

I always thought the Simon Oakland psychoanalysis at the end of Psycho was played partly for laughs, and was put in there to appease/preempt others who would have wanted such an explanation. In other words, it is to some degree a formal piece of filmmaking and not necessarily an explanation as such.

― Ken L (Ken L), Monday, 28 February 2005 11:29 (twenty-one years ago)

Ditto on appeasement... The Simon Oakland Explains scene is clearly the least interesting one in Psycho to Hitchcock, but the 1960 mass audience would've been lost without something like it.

I don't think Hitchcock as an artist is anymore committed to Freud as a cure/salve then he is to Catholicism (ie, the 'miracle' that saves Fonda in The Wrong Man). Whatever gimmicks the scripts use, his imagery and emphasis often stays disturbingly ambiguous or undermines the literal meaning of the dialogue.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 1 March 2005 15:13 (twenty-one years ago)

there is not enough freud in movies anymore!

there's way too much jung though, thanks to lord of the rings, star wars, and the matrix.

― latebloomer: Klicken für Details (latebloomer), Wednesday, 2 March 2005 02:54 (twenty-one years ago)

one month passes...

In a film class, I once read a Freudian reading of "Rear Window." Interesting stuff, but a bit too deconstructionist (in the philosophical, not literary, sense). The part about the sphincteral camera shutter battling the phallic lens was priceless.

― Sean D. (Sean the guy), Sunday, 10 April 2005 21:10 (twenty years ago)

That seems to be a fair reading of the film. Certainly as compelling and definsible as the line of thought that has each of the characters in the courtyard windows represent one "theme" of Grace-Jimmy's relationship hestitations.

― Eric von H. (Eric H.), Sunday, 10 April 2005 23:19 (twenty years ago)

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