Hospitality and the Scene of Contract in Dial M for Murder

Alone in an urban apartment after hours, a man pours another man a drink. The two meet only once, and yet their transient encounter is not without rules. The guest thinks he is there to sell a car, but due to the irregular time and place, expects a certain hospitality—not just the drink, but a comfortable seat, a chance to smoke, and pleasant interaction. Little does he know that he has it badly wrong. The men are not strangers, but old college acquaintances; the guest is not selling a car, but slowly being coerced into a contract killing. And the apartment does not belong to the host, but to the wife he wants dead. What looks like hospitality is both a stage set and a strange form of trespass and usurpation, as the ostensible host maneuvers his way toward actual ownership. As we watch all of this in a movie, where do we come in? What determines our access to this scene of twisted hospitality, the defining one of Dial M for Murder (1954)? Our perspective aligns with the host, since we meet him before the encounter and watch him prepare. But our understanding lags behind, little better than the guest's whose fate we learn along with him. And we remain tied to another character, the wife who is the one true host of both the apartment and the movie—or who would be were it not for Hitchcock himself, host and stage manager behind it all, whose contract with the viewer is also a lot more complicated than selling cars.¹

The uncertainty of modern hospitality forms a major premise of Hitchcock's career, which most agree finds its true beginning with a film helpfully called The Lodger (1927), and which only fully consolidates once he begins hosting a television show.² Hospitality underpins and intensifies more evident concerns, operating continually and often alongside the primary focus of awareness.³ I believe one reason hospitality has not been given the critical attention it deserves is that the concept needs renovation.⁴ An ancient institution, hospitality conjures up quaint scenarios. But despite Hitchcock's occasional visits to stately manors or humble cottages, more often he takes us to newer sites of interaction: motels, train compartments, automobiles, or the urban apartment of Dial M for Murder, not to mention those of Rope (1948), Stage Fright (1950), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Frenzy (1972), every one of which brings a guest on the premises under suspect circumstances.⁵

Abuses of hospitality preoccupy the thriller genre in general, from both the host's and the guest's perspectives. For the host, the guest becomes an intruder, challenging the control of the space, threatening person and property. For the guest, drawn by offerings that range from basic shelter to sophisticated socializing, the space of hospitality ensnares her in the designs of others. Hospitality thus devolves under duress into a struggle for position, both physical and social. And a good deal of what makes Hitchcock's thrillers distinctly uncanny is the way seemingly strong positions turn out to be weak, a mere matter of appearances.⁶ As we see most explicitly in films like Stage Fright, Rope, and Murder! (1930), domestic space is always theatrical in Hitchcock, not just in the way that all social roles involve performance, but at a more calculated level of deception. Who directs this theater becomes the question. The power to wield the norms of civility, to conscript objects as props, to narrate unfolding events—these abilities determine who will define the situation and control the stakes of hospitality.

As the real guests of honor, viewers have a particular role to play in Hitchcock's special brand of thriller, a role based on our own advantageous position.⁷ Suspense, as Hitchcock defines it, requires that viewers know more than characters—it is the height of our privilege.⁸ Relevant therefore to the films' much discussed ethical and political hazards, this advantage can nonetheless easily be taken for granted as the first clause of the viewer's contract...