INTRODUCTION
This presentation offers
a study of guilt and innocence in Hitchcock's work. My analysis relies
on a sociological perspective inspired by Durkheimian sociology and the
work of anthropologist Victor Turner.
I offer an interpretive analysis
of visions of guilt and innocence in Hitchcock's films that refrains from
psychologistic dream analyses and instead develop a uniquely sociological
perspective. In terms of sociological focus, I will rely on the work of
Emile
Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, and the anthropology
of Victor Turner. I will apply insights from
the 'auteur' perspective popularized through François Truffaut’s
published interviews with Hitchcock and Hitchcock's ideal of 'pure cinema'.
Durkheim
and Friends
The
work of Emile Durkheim is centrally concerned
with the question of social order. No society more than our own emphasizes
the individual as the core unit of normative prescriptions on rights and
responsibilities. How then, Durkheim and any other sociologist ask themselves,
is social integration achieved? Durkheim argued that there has to be a
normative force that individuals in a society accept as valid to enable
further binding obligations and specifications of rights and duties.
In his work on religion and
ritual, Durkheim (1912) studied the mechanisms by which societal norms
are lived, how they are produced and reproduced. Religion, Durkheim argues,
is not only a system of beliefs, it is also action, particularly ritual
action. A central idea in Durkheim's work is that during ritual ceremonies
the participating group is most consciously and most actively aware of
itself as a group. The group is really the group --is only the group--
when it celebrates itself. Furthermore, through ritual practice the group’s
cohesiveness, exemplified by the physical assembly and the focus on a symbol,
is secured, lived, and maintained. The group is renewed, and the individual,
as individual, which can only be as group member, is strengthened by participating
in the ritual. Particularly because of the power of symbols a society is
celebrated through rituals.
From Durkheim's work, sociologists
have learned that rituals --small or momentous, temporary or enduring--
serve to re-enact central values and norms guiding society at large. A
wedding, for example, is a matter that pertains to all of society. It details
and celebrates fundamental norms of sexuality, gender, and life. A wedding
is not about the love between two people, but about the adoration of society
for itself.
I
love you... You love me.
WE
ALL LOVE SOCIETY!
Extending
the Durkheimian Circle
Durkheim's outlook forcefully
argues for the societal constitution and re-integrative functions of ritual.
Yet, it tends to emphasize the social origins and consequences of ritual
at the expense of an analysis of ritual enactment itself. This question,
"what happens during ritual practice?," is central in the work of the anthropologist
Victor W. Turner, who critically built on Durkheim's oeuvre (Deflem 1991).
Victor Turner developed a
unique anthropological perspective of ritual that extended beyond Durkheim's
emphasis on the re-integrative functions of ritual (Turner 1967, 1969,
1974). Turner defines ritual as "prescribed formal behavior for occasions
not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in
mystical beings and powers." A symbol is the smallest unit of ritual which
still retains the specific properties of ritual behavior.
Importantly, Turner identified
a three-phased process of ritual. Building on the fact that a ritual exemplifies
the transition of an individual from one state to another, Turner noted
that between the states the ritual subjects are often secluded and spend
time in an interstructural situation, characterized by Turner as liminality.
During the liminal phase, the ritual subjects have a "no longer/not yet"
status: the subjects are "neither here nor there; they are betwixt and
between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention,
and ceremonial" (Turner 1969:95).
Turner
argued that the very essence of ritual performances was not, as Durkheim
would have it, a celebration of the social order or social structure, but
an attempt --successful, albeit only temporary-- to escape from the demands
and functions of the structures of society in order to create communitas
or anti-structure. Communitas is defined in opposition to structure. Social
structure refers to the normatively proscribed arrangement of positions.
Communitas refers to liminality, marginality, inferiority, and equality.
The characteristics of the social structure are no longer and not yet applicable
during the period of liminality in ritual and other forms of communitas.
Ultimately, however, the fate of communitas is a "decline and fall into
structure and law" (Turner1969:132), after which a new form of communitas
may rise again.
I will develop the central argument
of this presentation that the films of Alfred Hitchcock are to be conceived
as rituals of liminality.
