Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) (Patreon)

"I got your double espresso right here, pal!"

This one was tricky. Although I usually try to formulate my thoughts on a film without reading a lot of outside criticism, I needed a hand with Notorious, because in certain ways it seemed to needlessly cruel. By setting Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) up as the quarry in an international espionage scheme, the film seemed at first to be using her as a narrative metonym for her father, a convicted Nazi war criminal. It was almost as though fascism  was being implicitly compared with a woman's sexual freedom -- two signals of impurity, one in the political realm, the other in the system of heterosexual exchange, perversions that required punishment by the dominant order.

Of course, once I took a minute to work it through, and consider the opinions of others, I changed my mind. Notorious sets up this comparison in order to show how preposterous it is. Devlin (Cary Grant) presumes that Alicia will be able to follow through on the plot to seduce and destroy Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) because she is "that kind of woman," and should be suitably unencumbered by conscience or emotion. And despite Alicia being in a vulnerable position socially and politically, Dev believes it's her responsibility, not his, to articulate any possible moral objections.

It also took me a minute to dispense with my prejudices regarding Hitchcock. Unconsciously, I tend to think of him as an absolute master who sprang fully-formed from the head of Athena. But he was just an artist, learning and striving like everyone else. Notorious represents a key moment in his development. He isn't employing the visual fireworks he'll embrace in later films. There's a solid, "genius of the system" quality to Notorious that almost makes it seem like an artifact of Hollywood professionalism, and one has to look a bit more closely to see how Hitchcock is breaking the mold here. 

Certain aspects of Notorious that initially struck me as problems are actually deliberate functions of an overall structure that disrupts and recodes conventional viewer identification. The film emerged at the height of film noir, and so Hitchcock and Ben Hecht can reasonably expect savvy audiences to perceive Alicia as a femme fatale. She's alleged to be sexually loose, and she comes from tainted stock. What the film shows us instead is that she maintains a rough exterior because she's had a damaging life. In fact, she is the least manipulative character in the film.

What's more, the fact that Notorious elides the early development of Alicia and Dev's courtship means that we have no "good Dev" by which to identify with him. Alicia's love for him is a mysterious fact, something we just have to accept. Alas, Alicia's fealty to Dev and his proto-CIA associates means she has to become a double-dealer, marrying and manipulating Alex who, whatever his ideological flaws, is utterly unguarded in his love for Alicia. It's his devotion to her that is his downfall. Meanwhile, Dev attempts to thwart his feelings for her with sneering condescension, masked by a brusque professional demeanor that provides him a thin cover of deniability. (It's gaslighting, really.) So Alicia is constantly in a double-bind. She goes along with the dangerous ruse because it's how she can prove her moral worth to Dev. But the more she goes along with it, the more harshly she's judged.

Not to take anything away from Notorious itself, but it's possible to see it as a kind of dry-run for Vertigo. Hitchcock plays with an audience's awareness of genre codes, and our ingrained sexism, to convince us that men of the law, presumably embodying moral rectitude, are reckless to the point of neurosis. Women are obliged to contort themselves into whatever shape the man deems necessary -- Vertigo's "apt pupil" -- and then they are regarded as faithless and scheming for doing what was always expected. In other words, Hitchcockian femininity is a masquerade demanded by a patriarchal order that also expects truth, vulnerability, and learned helplessness. In short, heterosexual desire in Hitchcock is a killing machine.