MARTHA ALEXANDER, YEAR 13

If you had your deepest desire manifest; what would happen? Perhaps your answer could be prompted by words I associate with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train: obligation, guilt, duality, pretence, invasion, terror. Hitchcock morphs the ultimate triviality and anonymity of two ‘Strangers on a Train’ into partners in crime, tightly bound into silence by displaced guilt from a ‘I’ll do yours if you do mine’ murder pact. Hitchcock’s masterpiece explores how the subconscious can be political: how social order can disintegrate with the power of one thought.

Other than a +1 prescription, the lens though which I watch this film is a Gothic one. Frank Botting argues that The Gothic genre personifies the fears of the milieu into an oppressive misanthropic figure: an understanding which helps us analyse character relations in the film. Under Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, investigations were produced to find the supposed ‘enemy’ of Communism believed to have infiltrated American society. Highly ironically, the fear of emulating oppressive Stalinism resulted in what is estimated at hundreds of imprisonments and 12,000 people blacklisted from their jobs. Deeply contextualised in McCarthyism, the Whitfield Cook screenplay perverts the fear of what talking to a stranger might invoke. After being interrogated, rather than being blacklisted and arrested for a belief, Guy’s beliefs are made to happen. Whether in the Red Scare or in the film’s scenario, people suffer from displaced guilt for an action they are unaccountable for. That ideas or imagination might make one guilty of a crime is the McCarthyite societal fear that Hitchcock explores. Drawing us back to the Gothic; societal fears of surveillance and interrogation become manifest in the ‘psychopath’ Bruno. Guy, by nominal definition, is an everyman. Hitchcock utilises this everyman figure to project this result of interrogation onto humanity; as his ideas make him guilty, so do ours make us. It takes the embodiment of Guy’s unrestrained subconscious or Byronic double in Bruno to complete the action and make Guy culpable for it. Yet, in our recent age of social media’s willed surveillance, there is a fear that our existence online may indict us in thought-crime, and we are responsible rather than our Gothic double. Now there’s an plot for a novel.

Here, a parallel in the genre can be drawn with Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. Dorian remains physically unscathed by his violence, while his portrait becomes ghoulish as it manifests the evil instead. Guy and Bruno’s conversation on the train can be seen to mirror Dorian’s personal reflection on his portrait. It is a direct address and tension between the façade of restrained behaviour and a primal subconscious. The tension between selves can be understood as a doppelganger. In 1796, the German author Jean Paul coined the term in his novel Siebenkas, which was elaborated in a 1924 edition of Blackwood’s magazine most definitively as a ‘visitation of another self’… who ‘commits every atrocious crime of which he would never have believed himself capable’. Bruno may not be Guy’s doppelganger, and just the ‘crazy fool’ that Guy believes him to be. Yet the mere thought that Guy would kill Mariam to marry Anne is what makes Bruno act, and turns Guy into the ‘crazy fool’ worthy of scrutiny. Any comment from Guy about Bruno is a comment on his double and therefore himself. However, this poses an interesting tension between whether punishment for thought is morally right or wrong. Believing himself innocent for not killing Mariam is a thin attempt to exonerate guilt in this cinematic universe. By thinking, Guy is guilty. Surely, though, the thought of death is immoral? If the police thought anyone was genuinely considering murder, would they consider them a suspect? As aforementioned, Orwell’s ‘thoughtcrime’ is as present in a fearful post-war American state of the film, as it is in the era of the present-day filmgoer.

Where the anonymity of ‘strangers’ becomes uncannily familiar, doubles become an integral part of the film’s structure. Hitchcock’s central plot is based on the crossing of murders, which permeates every other element of the film. Train tracks, ‘doubles’ in tennis, ‘doubles’ in whiskey shots, crossing rackets and crossing legs all culminate in the central theme of ‘double crossing’. This double negative becomes the failure to fulfil half of the bargain. Guy refuses to complete the deal, which  doesn’t benefit him by any means. What is so brilliant about Bruno’s net of a pact is that Guy is indicted even in his practical innocence. Equally, Guy’s closest family become just as embroiled within the doubles match. Miriam’s visual doppelganger is Guy’s fiancée’s younger sister, Barbara. Upon meeting her, Bruno is haunted by his crime as a result of this likeness. Hitchcock captures Mariam’s murder in the reflection of her glasses, which look strikingly like Barbara’s. In this doubling, Bruno’s guilt is not put to death alongside Miriam, but rather haunts every character as the victim appears resurrected. Ironically, the glasses through which one should see the dilemma more clearly, only act to fog the truth of who is and is not guilty.    

Both Bruno and Guy’s respective truths knot in a conflict as the audience watches the truth of the murder unravel. Within the context of Guy’s family life in Metcalfe, the close-knit community strikes a great contrast to the anonymous and un-knit people of Bruno’s life in Washington DC. Hitchcock’s idiosyncratic use of chiaroscuro (dark to foreground the lighted subject) works to undo the illusion of a static right and wrong. The accountability of the murder is unpindownable if Bruno and Guy are a singular personality of the expressed self and the repressed self. Light requires dark, like the simplified goody Guy requires the baddy Bruno to execute his worst desires. An audience may believe that Guy is innocent, even though Hitchcock himself claims ‘it’s just as if he had committed the murder himself’. Equally, an audience may adore Bruno’s suavity, although ‘he’s clearly a psychopath’ according to the same 1962 Hitchcock/Truffaut interview. The morality of the audience complicit in this scene could not be more grey.

When handling the form of the film, the visual interplay between both anti-heroes requires observation. Our visual scene is ultimately what is unsaid. The unsaid is multifaceted, and complements the centrality of doubling. Deviant sexuality can be one reading: the intimacy of Guy and Bruno tying the other’s tie, then failing to be intimate because of the presence of violence in the punch or the gun reflects the failure of Guy to consummate their intricate murder pact. Whilst the gender disparity within Stoker’s Dracula, for example, endows the male protagonist or Byronic hero with tangible power over a damsel in distress through the penetrative imagery of fangs, Hitchcock subverts this trope. Bruno has the ultimate control within this relationship, despite his effeminate characterisation. Perhaps the fact of both characters’ male identity enforces that they are the same person. Alternatively, the ability to champion the other is the ultimate assertion of masculinity, and requires male protagonists to sustain this fragile pursuit of identity. Another visual aspect that I imagine The Bronte Reader would adore is the mimesis of violence. Bruno’s manicure is illustrated immediately after Guy has shouted ‘I could strangle her’ down the phone. By overlapping the intention and the action visually and audially, Hitchcock binds Bruno and Guy in their guilt. Drawing us back to the context of McCarthyism, Guy’s iteration is as amoral as Bruno’s action. Similarly, the most delicate Gothic imagery captures Bruno and his bloodhound standing abreast atop a Victorian dark-wood staircase. Gender does not provide either protagonist with the ability to assert dominance, but Bruno no less fulfils the role of Gothic hero.

Cyclicity is another fundamental aspect of The Gothic. Repetition creates a sense of entrapment in the film: the motif of locomotives as a mobile prison, where all are carried along by an inexorable force, is equally present in the fairground. Hitchcock’s rising action and denouement are both situated in the fairground, making the narrative cyclical. Again, the anonymity of the fairground implies that the fortune of these ‘strangers’ could be anyone. It could be us, next. Tiomkin’s score for the fairground is uncanny upon its fifth iteration, and becomes violent as the audial equivalent of the swirling of teacups or the trains. Through the repetition of the ‘merry-go-round’, even what should be fun becomes menacing. Pleasure in the film, whether it is Miriam and Guy’s respective infidelity, Bruno’s sadism or a child’s glutting at a fairground, is always a paradox of fatal fun.

Enough of this intellectualisation. The film is awfully entertaining, whether one is accompanied by The Cambridge Companion to The Gothic Novel, or not. The screenplay has Bruno’s character established as ‘a beautifully finished door… warping unnoticeably and through the tiny cracks one could only glimpse the crumbling chaos hidden inside’, which is too lyrical a conceit not to share. I have now indulged in this monochromatic masterpiece four times, and I am all the better for it (or so I tell my psychiatrist). Enjoyment, however, does not undermine the film’s edifying purposes. What the film invites the audience to reflect on is the nature of surveillance, and whether our thoughts should, or, in the current political climate, do make us guilty of a crime. In an age where protest in the UK is becoming increasingly policed, are we afraid that the possession of thoughts will make us guilty? Potentially, we should all have a doppelganger to enact them for us. Who said we don’t?