1. What's wrong with Hitchcock's women
Few would disagree that Alfred Hitchcock was a master film-maker, but the female
characters in his films range from stupid to cunning to traitorous, complains Bidisha
Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren filming The Birds. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Alfred Hitchcock, what a ladykiller. There he is, lurking with rotund
grandeur at the very forefront of film greatness, like an over-zealous
restaurant manager in a PG Wodehouse novel. There are lots of
reasons to love Hitchcock, of course: the style, the guile, the pace, the
pitch – I realised that afresh when watching a box set of all his films, in
preparation for a talk at the Southbank Centre on Sunday. Hitch knows
how to frame a shot. But when it comes to the ladies, it's slim pickings.
Indeed that is literally what his women do: pick their way slimly through a
range of awful experiences and deceitful pathologies so extreme you'd
be howling with laughter, were the art of cinema not so very serious.
There's the vamp, the tramp, the snitch, the witch, the slink, the double-
crosser and, best of all, the demon mommy. Don't worry, they all get
punished in the end.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The chief skill of the Hitchcock heroine
is to lie, inflict and then suffer untold torments without ruffling her hem. If
you want some full-on misogyny, rampant woman-blaming and outright
abuser apologism, look no further than Marnie. Marnie is a liar, thief and
all-round uptight frigid piece of trouble who is set up, blackmailed into a
forced marriage and raped by her husband. She tries to kill herself. The
husband subjects her to a private investigation – raping her past. Turns
out Marnie's pathology is entirely the fault of another woman, her

2. mother, who was a prostitute, of course. One night during a storm one of
her mother's johns tried to comfort Marnie, because men who use
prostitutes are such nurturing guys. The mother, silly thing, totally
misconstrued it and thought he was molesting Marnie, so she went for
him. And then Marnie, the daft little sausage, got all hysterical watching
the ensuring tussle – and killed that poor sweet innocent guy with a
poker. Anyway, once we get to the bottom of all this, Marnie has a
brainwave and decides to make it work with her lovely young abusive,
stalking, blackmailing rapist husband. Ah, happy endings.
Hitchcock's women are outwardly immaculate, but full of treachery and
weakness. But, hurrah, he doesn't kill them all. He just teaches them a
thoroughly good lesson. In North By Northwest, a seemingly never-
ending adventure farce about mistaken identity, double-crossing and
CIA agents, Roger O Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) is the innocent fall
guy caught up in the life of lying, duplicitous, butter-wouldn't-melt
undercover agent Eve. Underneath, of course, Eve's just another
malicious featherbrain who got into the agenting business because she
was flattered to be asked to betray a secretive ex-lover. I love that
combination of stereotypes: we're stupid, cunning, soft-hearted and
traitorous, all at the same time. Only in the mind of a true hater can
these contradictory qualities come together in the nasty piece of work
that is Woman. Anyway, silly girl, Eve gets found out, her life's in danger,
she falls for the fall guy and winds up dangling one-handed over a ledge.
Roger saves her.
In Rear Window, LB Jeffries (played by James Stewart) is a
photographer recuperating from a broken leg, idly watching
his neighbours from his window. One of them is a shrew, a nagging wife.
She gets a shrew's comeuppance when her husband kills her, parcels
her up and disposes of her in suitcases. Then he assaults Jeffries's
girlfriend Lisa when she goes to investigate, although she's saved at the
last moment. Rear Window's a strange, cowardly, mean film. It ought to
be about the horror of witnessing a wife-killer doing his business.
Instead, the subplot is about gratuitously bringing the loving, sincere and
helpful Lisa down a peg or two – and then showing how (yep)
untrustworthy she is. Played by Grace Kelly, Lisa goes from being a
glittering socialite to a modestly dressed girl next door who's interested
in camping. In the film's final moments, though, she slyly reads a fashion
magazine when her beau's asleep. Because that's what women are, you
know. Sly.
For a more serious message, look to The Birds. The Birds is a
resounding warning about what happens when a flirty female tries to

3. make a joke. Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren, is a prank-player
and liar (of course) who tried to gift some lovebirds to the younger sister
of Mitch, the chap she fancies. The entire bird world, chagrined to be the
pawn in a devious woman's game, gets its revenge. Thereafter, it's
women on the verge of a feathery freak-out, all the way. The message is
that women (a) are all about men and (b) can't get along because they're
so busy pecking and squabbling over men. Mitch's mum hates Melanie.
Mitch's mum hated Mitch's ex too, but Mitch's ex loves Mitch so much
she can't bear to live far from him. Mitch's ex hates Melanie and dies.
Mitch's mum is so hung up on men that since Man No 1 (her husband)
left her, she's gripped by fear that Man No 2 (her son) will leave too.
Melanie's own mean mommy abandoned her family. All these neurotic
females get the avian thrashing they deserve, in a squawking, Jungian
free-for-all of throbbing birds and fabulous hairdressing.
Speaking of hairdressing, we must mention Vertigo, a sumptuously clad
smackdown of female two-facedness. To cut a long but extremely well-
dressed story short, a lying duplicitous woman exploits an innocent
vertigo-suffering man, Scottie, by setting him up as a witness in a
murder plot. This plot involves a man murdering his wife and making
it look like a suicide prompted by mental illness. Shadowing the plan
mythically, and providing a kind of psychological alibi, is the tale of the
wife's great-grandmother, who killed herself a century before. In this
infinite kaleidoscope of mad, sad, bad, super-styled women, only one
thing is certain: she who lies, dies (although, come to think of it, the
innocent wife died, too). The duplicitous decoy falls in love, as ever,
with Scottie, the guy she's supposed to be duping. He gets his
revenge by breaking her down and making her into the image of the
dead wife. He makes her re-enact the murder at the top of a bell-
tower – thereby curing his own vertigo, though the film isn't really
about that. She gets what's coming to her and plunges off the edge
after being startled by … another woman. A nun.
And now for the biggie: the all-encompassing Hitchcockian entity known
as Mother. In North By Northwest the entire drama kicks off as the
protagonist is on his way to send his mother a telegraph. In The Birds,
lawyer Mitch lives with his mother when he's not working. In Vertigo,
Scottie chides his ex for being too motherly towards him when she's
helping him convalesce. And in Rear Window, Jeffries's therapist again
plays a strongly motherly, advisory role.
I think it's safe to say that little Alfred had mummy issues. Nowhere are
they more apparent than in Psycho. Despite its horror and suspense,
Psycho is one of the simplest of Hitchcock's films because the central

4. dynamic is so stark. It is also psychologically realistic, despite the
ghoulish trappings. Rather than the flapping Jungian panic of The Birds,
you have a Freudian, tight, Hamlet-like emotional model. The shower
killing scene that everyone remembers – the one with the cheap plastic
curtain – is just Hitchcock enjoying his favourite game of punishing a
female thief and liar, in this case a woman who has run off with some
money from her workplace and signed into Bates Motel under a fake
name. The real drama happens later. Norman Bates loves his mother so
much that he cannot bear her desire for another man. In a fit of jealousy
he kills her, and her lover. He has never grown out of his childlike
Oedipal rage and his bedroom is a creepy preserved little kid's room,
but as he grows older his feelings are overlaid by a very adult and pretty
commonplace misogyny. He is ashamed of his sexual desires and
projects his self-loathing on to the women he murders. Instead of taking
responsibility for murdering women, he blames another woman, his
mother. He takes on her guise to inhabit her, literally to get inside her
clothes the way a lover would. And he tells himself, in another massive
act of projection, that in the murders he is acting out his mother's
jealousy towards the women he desires.
At the end of my DVD viewing marathon I realised how revealing Psycho
is. Norman Bates is Hitchcock himself, kidding himself that women are
scheming devils and men are just innocent folk, acting up because they
got caught in a tricky situation.