From: drsteerforth@yahoo.com   
      
   "The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of   
   Suspense"   
   By Edward White   
      
   The Many Selves of Alfred Hitchcock, Phobias, Fetishes and All   
      
   By Parul Sehgal   
   Published April 6, 2021   
      
   In the world of Alfred Hitchcock, resemblance is fatal. It is the   
   story of “Vertigo,” of Charlie, in “Shadow of a Doubt,” named for a   
   beloved uncle who turns out to be a notorious murderer of wealthy   
   widows. Think of the falsely accused men in “The Lodger,” “The Wrong   
   Man,” “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” “I Confess,” “North by Northwest” and   
   “Frenzy.”   
      
   Of course, there was no one to resemble him. With his uniform of dark   
   suits, his Victorian manner, he was a relic in his own time. Only   
   Mickey Mouse cut a more distinctive profile. And for all the influence   
   of his films, he has no real inheritors, no one who combines silence,   
   suspense and wit in that particular way, with his winking   
   self-referentiality and the thicket of fetishes and symbols that   
   became a grammar of their own — the staircases, suitcases and icy   
   blondes, the parallel lines, the sinister glasses of milk.   
      
   It’s said that more books have been written about Hitchcock than any   
   other filmmaker. Edward White’s sleek and modest “The Twelve Lives of   
   Alfred Hitchcock” does not offer grand revelation but a provocative   
   new way of thinking about biography.   
      
   Any life is a study in contradiction — Hitchcock’s perhaps more than   
   most. He was a man afraid of the dark who was in love with the movies.   
   (Other phobias included crowds and solitude.) He was a famously   
   uxorious husband said to have preyed upon his actresses and   
   assistants. A man shamed for his body (the “300-pound prophet,” as The   
   Saturday Evening Post called him), beset by self-loathing, who   
   nevertheless possessed an enormous desire to be seen and relentlessly   
   used his body as a promotional tool.   
      
   Those films — were they art or entertainment? Were they “mousetraps,”   
   per Pauline Kael, or was Hitchcock “the greatest creator of forms of   
   the 20th century,” as Godard put it? “Hitchcock succeeded where   
   Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler failed,”   
   Godard wrote: “in taking control of the universe.” Hitchcock himself   
   shrugged off such seriousness. Let other directors foist slices of   
   life on the public; he wanted his films to be “slices of cake.”   
      
   White doesn’t reconcile these contradictions. He never needs to. He   
   presents the reader with 12 portraits of Hitchcock, taken from 12   
   different angles — including “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up,” “The   
   Voyeur,” “The Pioneer,” “The Family Man,” “The Womanizer,” “The   
   Dandy.” There is no verdict to be issued, no single identity most   
   authentic or true. His selves clash and coexist, as they did in a life   
   that spanned the emergence of feminism, psychoanalysis and mass   
   advertising, and a career that mapped onto the history of film itself,   
   from the silent era to the rise of television.   
      
   Strangely, through these refractions, we receive a smoother, more   
   cohesive sense of a man so adept at toying with his audience, on and   
   off the screen. (I would have added a 13th angle, however: “The   
   Dissembler,” for Hitchcock’s own joy in issuing contradictory   
   statements about his life.)   
      
   In the filmmaker’s own words, “the man is not different from the boy.”   
   The traditional task of the Hitchcock biographer has been to locate   
   the defining event that became the wellspring for his lifelong   
   interest in paranoia, surveillance and sexual violence. The biographer   
   as detective, as it were, wandering the Bates home in “Psycho,”   
   searching for the body of the mother, the all-revealing trauma.   
   Hitchcock was only too happy to play along (or dissemble), offering up   
   theories: the harsh beatings by Jesuit priests, early fascination with   
   Edgar Allan Poe, the day his father had him inexplicably locked up in   
   a prison for a few hours to teach him a lesson as a small child.   
      
   White indulges these explanations while subtly shifting the focus to   
   what Hitchcock rarely discussed — the death of his father and the   
   strain of living through war — “the very type of tortuous suspense and   
   grinding anxiety that was the adult Hitchcock’s stock in trade.”   
   Neighborhood children and infants died in the air raids, and White   
   suggests that “The Birds” — with the attacks on a school, and the   
   pioneering aerial shots — can be seen as Hitchcock’s way of reliving   
   the terror.   
      
   White’s style is unadorned and unobtrusive; only occasionally does he   
   allow himself a little turn of phrase (on Jimmy Stewart: “If Cary   
   Grant was Hitchcock’s favorite man of action, some heroic, imaginary   
   version of himself, Stewart was surely his favorite man of reaction”).   
   The psychologizing is of a delicate sort — far from Hitchcock’s own   
   ham-handed attempts, which his own characters seemed to mock. “You   
   Freud, me Jane,” Tippi Hedren says to Sean Connery in “Marnie.”   
   White’s real interest, and talent, lies in synthesizing the   
   scholarship, and in troubling easy assumptions.   
      
   Three Hitchcock films — “Rear Window,” “Vertigo” and “Marnie” — served   
   as the basis of Laura Mulvey’s conception of the “male gaze,” the idea   
   that Hollywood movies presented a vision of the world rooted in male   
   experience, with women existing as objects of desire.   
      
   Hitchcock’s work is rich with references to the tradition of the   
   “watched woman.” The very first shot in a Hitchcock movie, “The   
   Pleasure Garden,” features the bare legs of dancers running down a   
   spiral staircase, which White ties to Duchamp’s painting “Nude   
   Descending a Staircase,” which itself recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s   
   time-lapse photographic study of a naked woman walking down a flight   
   of stairs. In “Psycho,” again, we see this palimpsest effect: The   
   peephole Norman Bates uses to spy on Marion Crane as she undresses is   
   concealed by a framed print of Willem van Mieris’s “Susannah and the   
   Elders,” the biblical story of two men preying on a woman while she   
   bathes. But obsessive looking is full of complication in Hitchcock,   
   White argues; it is almost always punished. Scottie, in “Vertigo,” is   
   “driven mad by silent watching.”   
      
   Thwarted, unfulfilled desire is the wire running through Hitchcock’s   
   work. Oddly enough, biographies of artists can inspire a similar   
   feeling. As readers, we can expect to see the life neatly documented   
   and the work analyzed, but the connection, the filament between the   
   two? White never forces an explanation or coherence. The radial   
   structure vibrates, like Hitchcock’s best films, with intuition and   
   mystery.   
      
   Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.   
      
   The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of   
   Suspense   
   By Edward White   
   Illustrated. W. W. Norton & Company.   
   379 pages. $28.95.   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review-twelve-lives-of-   
   lfred-hitchcock-edward-white.html?action=click&module=At%20Home&pgtype=Homepage   
      
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