Dial M for Murder: the detective thriller, the postwar uncanny, and 3D cinema

ABSTRACT

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), 3D facilitates the film’s organization of the scopic and epistemological pleasures of the detective thriller around the perceptual experience of the uncanny. By filtering its décor through stereo-aesthetics, Dial M articulates a postwar dread of dispossession, challenges the spectator’s efforts to feel ‘at home’ in the depicted space and in the space of reception, and dramatizes how the (violent) violation of boundaries and the anticipation of homelessness shaped the experience of postwar modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• 3D cinema
• Dial M for Murder
• the uncanny
• cine-genres
• Hitchcock

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For details of the film’s production and critical reception, see (Furmanek and Kintz,).

2. Mulvey (2006), Gunning (2008), and Sandberg (2002) argue that uncanny media are associated with the violation of categorical boundaries, including those separating presence and absence, the living and the dead, and the past and the present. Although space doesn’t allow for detailed engagement with their arguments, Lippitt (1999), Rogers (2013), Ross (2015), and Jones (2020) closely analyze 3D’s reconfiguration of the relationship between diegetic and exhibition space, the haptic qualities of the 3D image, parallax effects, and the strangeness of 3D.

3. On these themes in film noir, see especially Polan (1986), Sobchack (1998) and Fay (2018).

4. Elsewhere (Whissel 2016, 2020) I discuss parallax effects in relation to knowledge and affect.

5. Jones (2020, 206–220) analyzes how negative parallax can be used to emphasize absence and longing in digital 3D cinema.

6. On operational media in digital 3D cinema, see Jones (2020, 67–91).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities Research Fellowship UC Berkeley; Susanne Carson Jessen Faculty Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Kristen Whissel

Kristen Whissel is Professor of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Spectacular Digital Effects (2014): CGI and Contemporary Cinema and Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology and the Silent Cinema (2008). She is currently writing a book on 3D cinema.