The Hitch Catch

Ever said to yourself, or even out loud, “If that happened in a screenplay, they’d turn it down. Too unbelievable for the audience to buy”? I sure have — most frequently in the past five years or so, let’s just keep this nonpolitical — but the fact is we’re wrong. The plots of some of the best movies ever made are absolutely ludicrous, but the audience has still bought them with wide-open wallets. Quite a few were created by the same man, one of the cinema’s greatest directors and certainly its most famous: Alfred Hitchcock. 

“It’s the responsibility of the filmmaker,” said Hitchcock, “to create a fictional universe so compelling and complete that we don’t notice implausibilities or, if we do, they don’t make any difference.’’ Throughout his work are instances where Coleridge is turned upside down and the audience is forced into an unwilling suspension of disbelief, propelled by a story which is chugging along faster than its ability to ponder and reflect. 

VERTIGO, one of Hitchcock’s most highly regarded films, is like a piece of delicate crystal, so fragile that it’ll shatter if it’s jostled. How did a murderer know exactly when and where to act, and manage to escape the scene of the crime with an accomplice? How did the Jimmy Stewart character, barely hanging off a roof in the opening scene, get down alive? How could someone deliberately pull off the scene in the San Francisco Bay? How could another person possibly predict the precise limits of the Stewart character’s fear of heights (one that Hitchcock shared). For the film to work — which it definitely does — the answer has to be, who cares: what happens now? That dreamy tilted feeling, the gradual slide of the audience into empathy with Stewart’s obsession, is no accident: fog filters, colors chosen to inspire emotions, even an unsettling nightmare in which we are taken inside his fevered mind, all draw us in and keep us off base so that we quit asking such annoying questions. Then, just like that, Hitchcock takes the dream away and snaps back to reality — and what remains is an exercise in suspense.

Unlikely coincidences also abound in Hitchcock. My favorite example is NORTH BY NORTHWEST, in which the entire plot is launched by a bizarre bit of bad luck in the first reel, when Cary Grant makes an innocent gesture at exactly the wrong time. From there, Hitchcock just starts having fun while the set pieces become more and more preposterous. You can almost hear him giggling. You think that was wild? Just a moment and I’ll top it. The fact that NORTH BY NORTHWEST is impossible is part of what makes it irresistible. David Fincher’s THE GAME works the same way, to the point that at the climax a character must, à la VERTIGO, wander into the precise correct spot to set up the finale, all by himself. How could you count on that in real life? You couldn’t. But by then the audience has already been asked to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Yes, it’s implausible. And your point is?

Alfred Hitchcock could play with reality like this because he had an almost magical connection with his audience and could put himself in their position with unerring accuracy. One of the most well-known shots in cinema history contains a tiny flaw, and once you see the error you can’t unsee it. The person who caught the flub during post-production was Hitchcock’s wife and principal collaborator, Alma Reville. But Hitch reasoned that the audience would be too traumatized at that point to notice, and he was absolutely correct. I’ll bet I could show it to you right now and you’d still miss the mistake, even if you know the film well. Hitch understood that processing the dramatic narrative is far more critical than parsing a photographic frame, especially when your heart happens to be pounding out of your chest. (I’ll try to point you to the moment without spoiling anything for newbies: it’s the last shot in a very intense sequence, and it opens on the subject’s unblinking eye.)

There are dozens of other reality-defying moments, unlikely coincidences and visual flights of fancy scattered throughout Hitch’s movies, which have an international reputation as great and worthy works of art. But Hitchcock’s most significant talent was the one he shared with P. T. Barnum: he was a magnificent and highly effective showman. He didn’t make his pictures for museums. He made them for the audience, which will suspend disbelief in exchange for a fight atop the Statue of Liberty every time.