Abstract
Echoing the consensus of our current American political punditry, the New York Times editorial board condemned the $24 billion Tea Party Republican government shutdown stunt of October 2013 as “juvenile,” with Democratic California Representative Nancy Pelosi calling it a “tantrum,” and Republican Utah Senator Orrin Hatch admitting, “You’ve got to have the adults running the thing.” From that same wing of the party comes Sarah Palin’s exhortation to traditional party members to “Man up!” and support the Tea Party. Each discussion about the fiscal cliff, raising the debt ceiling, sequestration, and The Affordable Care Act invariably invokes the same question: “Who are the adults in the room?” Congress and their TV commentariat tacitly employ taking responsibility for one’s words and actions and resisting uncontrollable political urges as its definition of maturity. American literature is riddled with characters, such as Rip Van Winkle, Holden Caulfield, Willie Loman, and Alfred Hitchcock’s man-child, who struggle to “come of age.”
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Notes
Henry A Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1957),
trans. Stanley Hochman, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), 84. Rohmer and Chabrol have a lot to say about Hitchcock’s close-ups—but some of it, like the shot itself, is hyperbolic. In their overly enthusiastic appraisal of Under Capricorn (1949), they call the shot of Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman) watching Milly (Margaret Leighton) replace the threatening shrunken head as “one of the most significant close-ups in the history of cinema” (99), which it certainly is not.
For a sustained psychoanalytic reading of Hitchcock’s films, consult Theodore Price, Superbitch! Alfred Hitchcock’s 50 Year Obsession with Jack the Ripper, and the Eternal Prostitute. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Lanham, MD: New Discoveries, 1992, 2011).
Hitchcock “inscribes a sexual signifier…the bottle—Charles holds it in his hands, which obsessively play with the cork—is accorded a prominent place in the frame, one that underscores its clear schematic significance: it is the stand-in for Charles’s penis.” William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1982), 215, 218.
See, for example, Paul Gordon, Dial M for Mother: A Freudian Hitchcock (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), Tania Modleski’s excellent The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London: Routledge, 1988),
Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1997),
and Slavoj Zizek, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992, 2010).
Laurent Bouzereau, dir. The Making of Psycho (Universal Studios Home Video, 1997). Video.
Donald Spoto, Spellbound By Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (New York: Harmony, 2008), 267.
Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1963), 43.
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© 2014 Debbie Olson
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McBride, W.T. (2014). Alfred Hitchcock’s Stylized Capture of Postadolescent Fatheads. In: Olson, D. (eds) Children in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472816_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472816_13
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