Uncanny Reflections: Frenzy as Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope

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Acknowledgements

In some ways, this article parallels the long journey that turned Kaleidoscope into Frenzy. Over the years, the piece continually transformed. Such refining transformations were inspired by a steadfast set of readers who helped me productively shift my gaze on the film, sensing its formal depths and theoretical possibilities.

The piece began life as a term paper in D.A. Miller’s Hitchcock seminar many years ago in graduate school. He encouraged my interest in the seemingly exceptional Hitchcock film, supported my closing turn to Lars von Trier, and continually engaged with the piece through many revisions. Such work was merrily punctuated by Hitchcock-oriented conversations over the most delicious meals. With great sensitivity, my editor Leslie Kriesel helped bring the piece from its wilder, more mechanically loose days as a term paper into a research article. Matthew Hunter and Rob Weiner saw the piece at various stages (earlier and later, respectively), helping me finesse my readings. The journal reviewers offered a panoply of enriching perspectives that led me to key unread secondary sources and unseen Hitchcock films (Torn Curtain, I can attest, deserves more than the fleeting reference it gains here!). Finally, Deena Varner closely followed the article from its opening to closing stages. Her commentary fruitfully shifted scales—moving between savvy calls to develop the piece’s theoretical armature around the kaleidoscope in earlier drafts to graciously reading through the final proofs with me, line by line, in the aim of finding the lingering mechanical issues and readings that still needed tightening. Her careful eye immensely strengthened the piece.

The conversations with all these individuals, both in-person and epistolary, made for a most thrilling kaleidoscope through which to see a film I love anew, and they proved how research can be a joy. They have my warmest thanks.

Disclosure Statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In his analysis of Freud’s close reading of “The Sandman,” Samuel Weber meditates on the telescope’s name in the original German as a Perspectiv: “this Perspectiv can never be definitively appropriated: it only is in circulating, and in circulating it merges with and diverges with other perspectives. Such circulation never comes full circle and therefore leaves no place undisturbed, no body whole” (2000, 18). Weber’s assessment of the Perspectiv resonates with my own understanding of Hitchcock’s kaleidoscope so sharply defined within the auto-critical Frenzy, an apparatus that encourages a constant circulation of contesting perspectives and which makes clear its distortions where no body is left whole. A fuller theorization of the filmmaker’s reflexive apparatus occurs in the subsection, “Theorizing Frenzy as a Kaleidoscope.”

2 Scholars across this array of critical appraisals share this article’s investment in how the film blurs subject positions in relation to the violence depicted onscreen—a point this article more fully theorizes. For instance, Jeanne Thomas Allen critiques the film’s ethical frame, offering an incisive formal analysis of the central rape and body disposal sequences as she details her own discomfort about the way the film forces viewers to share its killer's point of view (1985). Marcus Stiglegger, meanwhile, praises Frenzy as a powerful meta-film that reflects on the director’s broader style and exposes how Hitchcock seduces his audience into complicity with the violence onscreen (2017). While I also argue for the picture’s status as a meta-film on Hitchcock’s style, Stiglegger’s reading does not consider Frenzy’s underlying horror—its blend of cruelty and sympathy that point towards the morass of subject position the film fosters.

3 D.A. Miller expresses a strong skepticism toward Mulvey’s hold on much of film criticism in “Visual Pleasure in 1959,” decrying its entrancing effect on the field (Miller 1997, 45). In Miller’s view, Mulvey reduces classical Hollywood cinema to a binary that rests on heterosexual opposition, so that “we become blind to gay themes and images” (1997, 45). Her frame risks ignoring the ways that audiences of either gender could react to such themes with paranoia as well as the way the female star can displace homosexual desire in such cinema (1997, 46). Additionally, Eric Naiman performs a provocative symptomatic reading of Mulvey in “Shklovsky's Dog and Mulvey’s Pleasure: The Secret Life of Defamiliarization” (Naiman 1998). He places her original essays on the gaze against the psychoanalytic and Russian formalist tradition of which she was influenced and with which she was in dialogue. In line with my own interest in a Hitchcock film that goes unmentioned by Mulvey in her various writings on the filmmaker, Naiman notes that Mulvey has repressed Psycho (1960), a film whose transvestite killer troubles her governing paradigms about the gendered gaze (1998, 348). He ultimately argues that its iconic shower scene could be read as a twisted metaphor for the work of the feminist film critic as described by Mulvey—one who must analyze and ultimately destroy pleasure onscreen (Naiman 1998, 348–349). While such critics provide potent commentary on the limits of some of Mulvey’s formulations, it is worth emphasizing that Mulvey’s work on both the gaze and Hitchcock has continually evolved to encompass the ambiguities that emerge in cinematic spaces of visual pleasure. This essay briefly speaks to the evolution in Mulvey’s thinking.

4 As it is at times a mode of looking and a means by which Hitchcock captures cracks in the power dynamics between those at the center and those at the margins, this article uses the framework of the kaleidoscope rather than kaleidoscopic gaze; however, the latter term would have some applicability when describing both Frenzy and the filmmaker’s wider oeuvre.

5 A comparison with Vivien Merchant’s mirrored role in The Offence (Sidney Lumet, 1973) further clarifies the essence of a Hitchcockian characterization of the housewife. In The Offence, Merchant also plays the wife of a London police inspector, Detective Johnson (Sean Connery), who asks her troubled husband to share his experience with cases of sexual violence. Despite her intention to listen, Merchant’s character in the non-Hitchcock film cannot help but run away from talk of such violence, rushing to the toilet to vomit. In Frenzy, standing above her husband at the dinner table, she relishes such talk. As this comparison between the two Merchant performances shows, the housewife in Hitchcock is a woman who does not shy away. Her very innocent outward demeanor hides a hunger for violence, even as she shows the capacity to sympathize with the female victim, ably reflecting on and savoring disparities of power. Wielding insight and power over her husband, she ultimately has the same “preoccupation with crime” as the Englishmen of Hitchcock’s imaginary, where similarly “pent-up emotions are panting to escape” (qtd. in Weinraub 1971).

6 Frenzy’s sustained play with duration was presaged by the spy thriller, Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966), and its presentation of the murder of the East German agent, Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling). The scene presents Gromek’s slow demise at the hands of an American and East German woman. The camera emphasizes the strain of the killing, hanging on Gromek being choked, stabbed with a kitchen knife, hit with a shovel, and ultimately suffocated in an oven. The scene’s emphasis on the woman performing much of violence against Gromek, including stabbing the knife into his upper chest (framed to mirror the knife-toting Norman Bates in Psycho), hitting him in the knees with the shovel, and dragging his bleeding body into the oven, diverges greatly from the sustained rape scene of Frenzy which unrelentingly presents the slow death of a woman at the hands of the man. Such divergence between the formally resonant scenes marks the grueling rape and killing in Frenzy as a meditation upon female victimization.

7 Of course, Hitchcock’s cinema contains numerous examples where women successfully resist the men who seek to control or assault them. These include Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) in Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock 1943) who unveils the malignancy in her family as well as Margot Mary Wendice (Grace Kelly) in Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock 1954) who, thanks to the stereoscopic vision of 3-D film, finds the weapon to resist her attacker beyond the foreground where the audience sits. The viewer in Dial M for Murder is shown to visually assault the female victim but rather offer her strength to resist the man. Frenzy, with its macabre staging, resembles a lament of the limits of female resistance in a cinema that so often frames the female as fetish.

8 Modleski anticipates this reading when writing in her analysis of Frenzy, “But I do mean to insist on the importance of the fact that woman is never completely destroyed in these [Hitchcock] films” (Modleski 2016b, 113).

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Fareed Ismail Ben-Youssef

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef is Assistant Professor in Film & Media Studies at Texas Tech University. He earned his PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema (SUNY Press, 2022) which reveals genre cinema’s multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it. His work on global cinema has appeared in journals like The Journal of Popular Culture, Japanese Language and Literature, and Southwestern American Literature. As part of his efforts to teach outside the classroom, Ben-Youssef has also organized myriad university film series and hosted master classes with award-winning directors such as Ari Folman and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.