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• 1 2019-05-05T17:23:57-07:00 IV. Hitchcock & du Maurier 3 plain 2019-05-13T04:35:54-07:00 An examination of authorship in Hitchcock’s Rebecca would not be complete without a discussion of Daphne du Maurier. The relationship between du Maurier and Hitchcock could be the subject of an entirely different project altogether. In addition to Rebecca, Hitchcock adapted du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and The Birds for the screen. The relationship between the two authors/auteurs sheds light on that between film and literature, and the nature of adaptation. However, for the purposes of this analysis, it is more productive to analyze not the relationship between the film and novel, but the way in which du Maurier’s work influenced that of Hitchcock. This section seeks to explore not how Hitchcock differentiated himself from du Maurier and her Rebecca, but how being forced to adhere to du Maurier’s vision simultaneously made Hitchcock feel the picture was not his own and influenced his later work, becoming, ironically, central to our understand of the “Hitchcock picture.”

  In the case of Rebecca, the key piece of scholarship dealing with this subject is Tania Modleski’s essay, “Women and the Labyrinth: Rebecca,” a version of which is included in her seminal feminist study of Hitchcock, The Women Who Knew Too Much. Modleski begins her study of Rebecca by quoting the aforementioned memo from Selznick in which he instructs Hitchcock to more closely follow du Maurier’s characterization of “I”. In following Selznick’s orders, Hitchcock, as Modleski observes, relied heavily on audience identification with “I” as she tries to acclimate to life at Manderley. In doing so, Hitchcock, as Truffaut noted, developed a cinematic style that emphasized the psychological dimension of a character. Of this, Modeleski writes:

   

  Such are the paradoxes of autership: by being forced to maintain a close identification with du Maurier’s “feminine” text to the point where he felt that the picture could not be considered his own…, Hitchcock found one of his “proper” subjects — the potential terror and loss of self involved in identification, especially identification with a woman (Modleski, 1988).

  Rebecca is a story about a woman who controls the mind of a man from beyond the grave. Similarly, one might say that the story of Rebecca’s production is one about a woman (du Maurier) whose claim to authorship was so strong that she controlled the production of a man’s film (Hitchcock) from across the Atlantic. This may be why Hitchcock felt the way he did about Rebecca. However, the above passage from Modleski suggests more — though he may have wished to create a story of his own, Hitchcock so identified with the character forced upon him that it became part of his psyche, a crucial ingredient to the later ‘Hitchcock’ pictures. In her introduction to The Women Who Knew Too Much, Modleski writes:

  time and again in Hitchcock films, the strong fascination and identification with femininity revealed in them subverts the claims to mastery and authority not only of the male characters but of the director himself.

  Did Hitchcock himself know about the influence du Maurier had on him as a director, as an auteur? It is impossible to say. Modleski’s analysis recalls Leitch’s observation that Hitchcock often adapted the works of lesser-known authors so that he could more easily assert his own authorship. If we are to follow that line of thinking, which I believe to be accurate, then one is able to understand why Hitchcock felt as if Rebecca was not a ‘Hitchcock’ film; du Maurier’s claim to authorship, bolstered by Selznick and the press, was too strong.

  The “not a Hitchcock picture” line has typically been understood as Hitchcock devaluing the film. I know that when I first read Truffaut’s Hitchcock and reached that line I was shocked and a bit angry at Hitchcock for not acknowledging the film as a masterpiece. But, one could also view the comment as Hitchcock giving credit to du Maurier, as the auteur acknowledging that he was, in his view, not the primary author of the film.

  If one were at the dinner table arguing this point with Hitchcock, however, one might point to Wollen’s aforementioned discussion of auteur theory, in which he notes that the auteur theory is a form of decipherment that allows one to discover authors where none had been before.  Thus, Rebecca becomes, in fact, the ideal film to understand Hitchcock as an auteur. With so many competing authors, and so little creative control, one gets a glimpse into how the auteur, despite great limitations, is still able to direct a film in such a way that his own style permeates the film.