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I N T R O D U C T I O N Hitchcock, Gender, and the New Hollywood n the opening moments of Alfred Hitchcock’s cold, cunning 1954 masterpiece Rear Window, the camera, mobile with a pure cinema life of its own, roams about the apartment of L.B. Jeffries—“Jeff”—played by James Stewart. It’s a hot summer day, and the jazzy music in the background adds to the sultriness. An action photographer for magazines, Jeff, his leg in a cast from a work-related injury, is asleep in his wheelchair as the camera examines some of his possessions for clues to his identity, pausing deliberately to focus on various objects, especially some framed photographs. As if crawling into Jeff’s apartment from the outside, the camera scales the building, comes in through the window, stares at the perspiring Jeff, then scans the length of his seated body, particularly the extended cast in which one of his legs is simultaneously immobilized and erect, an apt metaphor for his version of masculinity. The movie camera then looks at the photographer’s crumpled camera on a desk, presumably destroyed in the accident in which Jeff broke his leg. Deepening the import of the images of broken-legged Jeff and the broken camera, we see a framed photograph of a car as it flips over in an auto race; unmistakably, the image of the cylindrical car with two large wheels along either side recalls a penis and testicles. But, given that this is an image of the accident in which Jeff broke his leg, and that one of the wheels is coming loose from the car, the photograph evokes castration as much as it reassures the spectator with the presence of the phallus. In one of the other P S Y C H O S E X U A L 2 photographs, a mushroom cloud climbs out of the frame; if we see a continuation of phallic/sexual imagery here, we might read this as a sign of orgasm, but also as a statement that male orgasm is apocalyptic. Next, we turn to a framed photograph of a smiling blond woman, her hair cut appealingly short. But the framed photograph is in negative film. This negative image in a frame is then juxtaposed against the actual image of the woman, on the cover of a magazine. That we see the negative image of the woman first seems to me significant. That the image is framed is also significant. Jeff can only see “negative” images of women, which does a lot already to explain his mysteriously contemptuous disposition towards his girlfriend, the beautiful, witty fashion model Lisa Carol Fremont , played magically by Grace Kelly. Moreover, Jeff frames his negative image of a woman, proudly displaying his own caustic, acidic take on sexual difference and perhaps sex itself. That the “normal” image of Woman appears on a magazine , and that this magazine is the top one on a stack of what are presumably more copies of the same magazine, signifies the mass production and circulation of normative images of gendered subjectivity. That this image is of a woman emphasizes difference, emphasizes the gendered distinction between the male subject and the female photographic object. Gender is the work of the age of mechanical reproduction. Of particular interest to me is the allegorical value of the distinction between the framed negative and that stack of magazines with the normal, real-life image. If we take the frame as an allegorical representation of the cinematic image—the frame within the frame—and the magazines, with their innumerable identical images, as the social order’s normative image of gendered identity, a model of sameness and normality endlessly reproduced and mass circulated, we can understand that Hitchcock is setting up a decisive, illuminating contrast between his own framing of women, and, for that matter, men, and the mass production of women and men as first and foremost visual personages, images of gendered selves. Subjectivity is created entirely from the outside in and is indistinguishable from the visual representation of it. Hitchcock’s negative images of women—and of queer subjects—have preoccupied a great deal of critical treatments since the 1980s. Though she frequently qualifies, amends, and problematizes her views of Hitchcock, Tania Modleski finds Hitchcock’s films rife with “lethal misogyny.”1 This seems to me a powerful and apt phrase even though I disagree with her about its presence, or the meaning of its presence...

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