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Christopher D. Morris, The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. xiii + 314 pp. $68.95
Hitchcock was known as the "master of suspense" well before academic film criticism canonized him as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. And indeed, one can argue that to accomplish this canonization, Hitchcock criticism had to show that the moniker "master of suspense" was somehow inadequate to his real achievement, that it smacked too much perhaps of populism, self-promotion, and Hitchcock's own disdain for "messages"-as if mastery were the product of the "mere" artisan or technician, and as if suspense were merely a trick or stock device. To make Hitchcock an artist meant necessarily to make his films into works of art; and, until recently at least, that meant to attribute to them not only a complexly nuanced rendering of psyche and world, but also a hidden design, the sense that all of those signs pointed ineluctably toward some deep truth that criticism was charged with uncovering. Thus, Hitchcock became the director whose suspenseful narratives were really tales of maturation and emotional growth, or exposés of the darkest impulses of the average moviegoer, or Oedipal conflicts whose resolution enshrined the normalizing union of the heterosexual couple. Criticism thus became, in Christopher D. Morris's characterization, a hermeneutic enterprise, in which the myriad and often contradictory signs presented to us by the films were ultimately "redeemed" by critical activity that revealed how they served a higher purpose in one or another transcendental narrative buried deep within the film.
One of the great values of Morris's study of Hitchcock's work-a study whose theoretical sympathies are unapologetically in the camp of deconstruction-is that it reinstates the centrality of suspense to Hitchcock's entire oeuvre. The hanging figure, omnipresent in Hitchcock's work, is in Morris's view the figure of suspense itself, as even the etymology of the word "suspense" suggests, whose root derives from the Latin pendo, meaning (transitively) "to place on the balance to weigh" or (intransitively) "tobe suspended or hung." And how many Hitchcock characters find themselves "suspended": from Scottie on the gutter, Eve on Mount Rushmore, and Jeff on the window sill, to the poisoned Alicia hanging on Devlin's shoulder,...