Why He Felt the Way He Did
IV. The Psychological Story
It was simply a psychological story, into which you deliberately introduced the element of suspense around the conflict of personalities. The experience, I think, had repercussions on the films that came later. Didn’t it inspire you to enrich many of them with the psychological ingredients you initially discovered in the Daphne du Maurier novel (Truffaut, 1984).
Before we get into the “psychological ingredients” that Truffaut refers to in Rebecca, let us deal with the more loaded phrase, “psychological story,” that precedes it. A surface reading of Hitchcock’s work reveals that the films he made during his life were what one might call “thrillers,” because they make use of suspense. However, as Guillermo del Toro once observed during an interview about his love for Hitchcock, suspense is merely a cinematic device. In his 1965 defense of Hitchcock, Robin Wood makes a similar point:
The mystery thriller element is, in fact, never central in Hitchcock’s best films; which is not to deny its importance. We could put it this way: “suspense” belongs more to the method of the films than to their themes…Look carefully at almost any recent Hitchcock film and you will see that its core, the axis around which it is constructed, is invariably a man-woman relationship: it is never a matter of some arbitrary “love interest,” but of essential subject matter (Wood, 2002).
By understanding that “essential subject matter,” one gets to closer to understanding what Truffaut means by a “psychological story.” Take, for example, a film like North By Northwest (1959). A surface reading of the film would yield the verdict that it is a fun, Hitchcockian thriller, aka a man is wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit — entertainment of the finest sort. But, if we are to understand it as a “psychological story,” one finds that it is truly a film about a man who lacks any sense of identity, and who discovers it by proving his innocence and falling in love with Eva Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). As Wood himself notes, at the film’s climax, Thornhill says to Kendall that his past two marriages ended because his wives could not stand the dull life he lived. North By Northwest is a story about a man who is forced to confront the banalities of his existence. Wood notes, “The struggle for life against the destructive elements (the spies) is thus combined with the cementing of the relationship, the sealing off of the past” (Wood, 2002). The film ends with Thornhill pulling her into bed and referring to her as “Mrs. Thornhill.” Wood writes that this is how Hitchcock expresses “the link between his survival of the ordeal and their relationship.” I would go one step further and say that Kendall, by now having his last name, becomes a stand-in for the part of him that was missing. She is the physical evidence of his psychological self-discovery.
The point of my digression is to show what Truffaut may have, in part, meant when he correctly observed that Hitchcock’s films in the wake of Rebecca take a turn towards the psychological. This point harkens back to the one made by Wollen in his discussion of the auteur theory. The Hitchcock “structure,” as it were, often involves a surface level, thriller plot, i.e., the man is wrongly accused, a romantic subplot in which the protagonist discovers something about themself through the relationship, and at its core an examination of human psychology and man’s relationship to one another and the world. It is with Wood’s superb introduction to the underlying psychology of Hitchcock’s films, and Truffaut’s observation that Rebecca was the first to employ this kind of psychology that I will begin my auteurist reading of Rebecca to illustrate that it is, in fact, a Hitchcock picture of the finest sort.