Spellbound

Abstract

Spellbound constitutes a virtual asylum of anxieties, a site onto which Hitchcock’s cinema projects deep-seated conflicts among performance as rampant fantasy production, institutionalization, the menacing and menaced agency of celebrity and director, methods of regulating histrionics, and signatures of authorship. Released in the fall of 1945, acting is no longer endemic to a world entering the theater of war, as in such works as The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, and Foreign Correspondent, but rather, in this posttraumatic milieu, a pathology of the self. The cosmos has devolved into a psychiatric institution whose inhabitants act in service not of national causes but rather personal dramas generated by private demons that afflict even proprietary figures. Within its competing complexes, Spellbound fixates on the threat of the role player whose unrestrained agency produces the most acute disorder: the appropriation of an authorial position designated as the province of the director.