PUBLIC
GUILT
Public guilt is the guilt
of a person labeled by the social order, the formal system of law and its
representatives. Most often in Hitchcock's films, public guilt means factual
innocence. The typical example --and Hitchcock gave us very many-- is the
image of the man wrongly accused.
Public guilt in the world
of Alfred Hitchcock is a processual event that moves through several successive
stages. Here I give examples of the various phases most typical in this
process of liminality through public condemnation.
Involvement
First, the innocent person
must get wrongly involved in an adventure than is someone else's. Often
times mistaken identity leads to involvement through a rather silly but
very consequential misunderstanding.
I have already used several
examples from
North by Northwest (1959), the
comedy/romance in which Cary Grant is chased across northern America, away
from the spies and straight into the arms of Eva Marie Saint. Many observers
indeed find this movie to be quintessential Hitchcock both in contents
and form. The involvement in North by Northwest occurs through a silly
coincidence. A man is in a bar with colleagues. He stands up to make a
phone call and walks out into the hall at the precise moment when a certain
Mr. Kaplan is being paged, setting off a series of strange events.
Click
image for video (
).
In The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) --Hitchcock's remake of his 1934
movie-- a man is on vacation with his wife and child in Marocco.
Out of nowhere, he is
approached by a dying man,
who tells him of a plot
to kill a statesman.-
Now the man knows too much.
Once the hero is involved,
a series of unexpected events, full of danger and suffering, will be forced
upon him and his family.
Affliction
The labeling of guilt does
not merely involve an initial involvement. Public guilt is a process that
through several stages includes public instruments and symbols of condemnation.
In the Wrong
Man (1957), the innocent man is questioned by the police for a crime
he did not commit. Questioning him, one of the officers observes: "An innocent
man has nothing to fear, remember that." Thereafter, the man is arraigned
before a judge and held in jail before he is eventually released.
In Saboteur
(1942), the man mistakenly held accountable for an act of sabotage is marked
by society's most forceful symbols of guilt.
The
Chase
The initial involvement leads
the publicly held guilty person to go on the run. The chase is not simply
an exciting adventure, although it is that too. It involves a transference
of guilt from one person (who did perform a crime) to another (who did
not). The chase is seen by society as a confession of guilt, but for the
protagonist its is the only possible means to search for truth, to attempt
to rid one self of the guilt society has inflicted.
The chase involves ridding
one self of someone else's guilt, a cleansing. It also means, by definition,
that someone else must be held accountable. Therefore, it is the falsely
accused who will have to find the real wrongdoer. And to make matters worse,
the police are often incompetent, at times even outright stupid, and further
complicating matters, implicating the falsely accused even more.
In The
39 Steps (1935), Richard Hannay, a Canadian visiting London, accidentally
meets a woman who is running away from secret agents. He hides her in his
flat, but during the night she is murdered. Knowing he will be accused
on the woman's murder, Hannay goes on the run.
The chase is the ultimate
device to portray the innocent person who is on the run from the machine
of formal law. During the chase, furthermore, more and more public guilt
is inflicted upon the falsely accused. In more and more ways, the victim
of public guilt is put in situation of great danger.
The man on the run in
North By Northwest at one point is led to an open field. He meets a man
there who takes a bus and remarks, "That's funny, that plane's dustin'
crops where there ain't no crops." Then, there is an attack.
In response, the accused
must go through a cleansing, not only a stripping of the public guilt from
one self but a tagging on to someone else. The price one has to pay is
typically some form of wrongdoing, an involvement in illegality that is
not of one's own choosing, a secondary guilt.
In The
39 Steps, the man on the run has to lie and steal to not get caught
and move closer to the real culprit. At some point he has to bribe a man
he hates but whose help he desperately needs.
Re-Integration
At the end of the chase,
the hero is cleared. But the cleansing always comes at a price, after a
long and intense period of suffering, pain, and loss.
In The
Lodger (1926), a man is mistakenly held to be 'Jack the Ripper.' As
he is handcuffed, a crowd chases him. Just before the real murderer is
discovered, he climbs over a fence and gets caught.
