Alfred Hitchcock's Films In The 20th Century

The 1950s oeuvre of Hitchcock could be seen to register the ideologies and insurgencies, the normative assumptions and the cultural alternatives, that shaped the tumultuous decade as reflective of the concerns and motifs of Cultural Studies. The films occupy a visual landscape defined by the grand monuments of American civic life-Mt.Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the United Nations-in addition to their marked preoccupation with the social mores and private practices of mid-century America. My attempt is to see Hitchcock’s films as a series of lucid interrogations of the totems of American life-the cult of motherhood, the mythology of the masterful male- and the institutions that celebrate, interpret, and patrol its cultural terrain: advertising, the judicial system, psychiatry, the police and the movies

Many of the elements of Hitchcock’s art-the yearnings of the private self, the shape of gender roles, the deep strangeness of the normal, the rich self-consciousness about the social or psychic meanings of film technique-emerge not simply as discrete themes or issues but an ongoing enterprise of cultural diagnosis. Thus Hitchcock, may be seen as something of a 20th century Tocqueville, anatomizing the lineaments of American culture and society, testing and contesting the “habits of the heart” that make America, truly American. Hitchcock is a cultural critic of remarkable insight and undeniable prescience/foresight (Freedman & Millington 6). When America was trying to construct and re-modify a new image for the nation in front of the whole world, Hitchcock was equally engaged in interpreting the middle-class ideology that