Re-Visiting the Double: A Girardian Reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train

If one is to explore the Oedipal origins of desire, or at least the popular manifestations of Freudian theory, the films of Alfred Hitchcock provide a fruitful starting point. Hitchcock not only places psychoanalysts in minor and principal roles, he also creates central characters whose tortured or “neurotic” relationships with mothers form key elements of his plots. Hitchcock’s work has therefore been the object of an enormous body of criticism that is largely inspired by the Freudian reading of desire as primordially sexual in nature and incestuous in its origins. The tendency, however, is to ignore those elements of Hitchcock’s narratives that do not fit well into the Freudian paradigm. It is also overlooked that Hitchcock’s portrayal of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis is often tinged with irony and subtle criticism. A competing theory of desire is found in the work of René Girard, who has questioned Freud’s assumption that desire’s teleology is rooted in unconscious incestuous cravings alone. Instead, Girard highlights the tendency of desire toward imitation and contagious propagation, a mimetic force that works from without as well as from within. Two of Hitchcock’s films illustrate the conflict between these two possible interpretations of desire: Rope and Strangers on a Train.¹ Hitchcock’s subtle recording of the role of mimetic desire in human violence and rivalry presents a profound counterpoint to the Freudian interpretation of desire. Girardian mimetic theory is best able to interpret the message that Hitchcock is trying to give about the tendency of desire to violence.

One of the frequent motifs in Hitchcock’s depiction of violence that fits poorly with the Freudian paradigm is the violence of a crowd against an innocent victim. It is easy to assume that the violence of a Norman Bates (Psycho)² or a Bruno Anthony (Strangers on a Train) is the product of some deformation of individual incestuous desire, especially when the victims are primarily women and the relationship of the killers with their mothers is clearly dysfunctional. But the unanimity with which a crowd or group can victimize an innocent is less clearly attributable to some defect in individual psychology. What is paramount in collective victimization is not individual libidinal conflict but the phenomenon of mimetic desire, the desire we acquire by imitation. Crowd or group violence suggests contagious desire, the members of that group becoming more and more alike and assimilating rather than individuating or differentiating. According to Girard, mimetic desire tends to close the gap between individuals. The more we desire the same things, the more we resemble one another, and even become doubles of one another (Girard 2002, 22).³ This is the point at which connections can be made between Hitchcock’s depiction of violence on the level of the crowd or the collective and his representation of individual desire. Hitchcock’s frequent use of the motif of the double is in particular amenable to a mimetic interpretation.

Freud held that desire was defined by its imprisonment in the family romance, that all present loves and desires are painted in the primary colors of previous attachments to mother, father, and sibling. Girard argues that desire is best understood as a drive for self-sufficiency or for “being.” Like Freud, Girard believes that present desires are mediated by models but denies that the primary models are those of the parent. Any model can embody the required self-sufficiency and erotic potency. Models of potency inspire desires by imitation and contagion. Girard suggests, too, that desire is triangular, that a thing or person is desired in imitation of the desire of the admired model (Girard 2002, 105–7). There are numerous examples of this in Hitchcock’s films. In Rope, the killer Brandon Shaw imitates what he takes to be the desires of his professor Rupert Cadell and carries out a killing in the quest to prove himself to be the “superior being” whom Cadell has praised so passionately in his lectures. Brandon’s thrill at killing an innocent victim is inconceivable without the...