HITCHCOCK'S QUEER DOUBLES1

• Published in: Ilha do Desterro no. 65; p. 17
• Main Authors: Brandão, Alessandra Soares, de Sousa, Ramayana Lira
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Florianópolis Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, UFSC Centro de Comunicação e Expressão 01.07.2013
• Subjects: American literature; Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
• ISSN: 0101-4846; 2175-8026

[...]we could argue that such characters are closer to being deleuzian simulacra than psychoanalytical doppelgängers. (201) burnham's graphic summary of the ways Hitchcock has remained a constant presence in critical thought is not meant to be exhaustive. if anything, it reveals the complexities at stake when dealing with the british director's films. if we were to give a more comprehensive graphic rendition of the ways we can approach Hitchcock, it should look like this: slightly out of focus, backwards and upside-down, vertiginous, incomplete, out of bounds, queer. in the first scenes of The Lodger, while a witness describes the murderer ("tall he was-and his face all wrapped up") one of the men in the crowd surrounding her pulls up his coat to hide his face, mocking the woman's agitated behavior. she then sees his reflection on the metallic surface of the food cart. According to the French philosophers, the same elements present in fluxes, strata and assemblies can arrange themselves into molar or molecular modes. The molar order is one where objects, subjects, representations and reference systems are stratified. conversely, molecular order comprises fluxes and becomings, transitions and intensities. in A Thousand Plateaus they say: on the one hand, multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious-and on the other hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold. [...]isn't the task of artists, who are exiled in the illusory realm of images, to idealize beings-to elevate them to their disembodied resemblance? (255) Finally, there is, of course, Norman bates, über-queer, our favorite cinematic pervert. or should we say there is Mrs bates inhabiting her son's body. or, maybe, a third possibility, a shifting desire that traverses the film and assumes many form. it takes the form of two sweaty bodies in a hot Phoenix afternoon. it passes on to the lonely taxidermist that runs a motel in the middle of nowhere. it is transfigured into an old woman's embalmed cadaver. it goes through the eye into the sinking hole, and back again to the eye that keeps on watching us. so, yes, Norman doubles his mother. but this is only one of the many forms that desire adopts. it shifts and its flux can only be contained by the end of film, where medical and psychoanalytical jargon works to present an explanation for it.