I can't see your soapbox, Doghouse. You offer many interesting observations; and I especially like your brief take on "tough love", which to me often feels like "sadism masquerading as kindness". In a way, the people in Hitchcock's films, due to their distance from us (as to chronology) are easier to empathize with, for me anyway, as they seem less ambiguous, as the nice ones are consistently nice for the most part.
For all this, there's the Ambiguity Of Evil in Hitchcock's films, going way back, as many of his villains are charmers; and some of the good guys are just plain weak, often due to age, maybe disability, or simply a "necessary self-absorption" (kids, ailing mothers in law, unhelpful, even greedy siblings and the like). The old expression A Good Man Is Hard To Find isn't really true based on my experience. My experience has taught me that the good far outweigh the bad, especially, and luckily, in our society.
Sadly, and often tragically, goodness is too often near to passivity than an active, hands-on quality. Yet if one lives in a city, as I do, if I've seen it once I've seen it a thousand times: someone, usually ill, elderly or simply unfortunate, cries out for help,--they're in pain,could be a heart condition or a sprained ankle--and in well under a minute they are surrounded by people, and all kinds,--young and old, rich and poor--and the unfortunate person on the ground is being questioned with genuine empathy and concern if they're in pain, or have a medical condition,--did they fall or were they pushed?--robbed or just someone rushing who knocked them down?--and in seconds Help Is On The Way. You can hear the siren in the background--and this is very reassuring.
Yet these kinds of everyday events seldom turn up in Hitchcock's films or in movies in general. They're not inherently dramatic so much as crises that need facing up to. In Hitchcock's world there's nearly always a pathology at work, somewhere, which shall provide the picture with a theme.
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Doghouse (447)
5 years ago
"Sadly, and often tragically, goodness is too often near to passivity than an active, hands-on quality."
- That zeros in on something I consider elemental: a passerby sees that person in distress and realizes, "I can do something about this, right here and now." As you say, hands-on. It's the larger, more widespread and gradual crises about which your average person, no matter how good, tends to become passive through a feeling of helplessness: "What can I do about it? I'm just one person. How can I change anything about the corruption of hundreds of our national leaders, and the hateful vindictiveness of millions of their followers?"
Again, Lifeboat has something to say: "We weren't a mob when we killed him. We were a mob when we sat around, prisoners of the man we saved..."
Or those we elected.
It's ironic that, 250 years ago, without the communication tools we now have that can reach millions in an instant, a populace could be roused to action in ways that hardly seem possible today. But that, as well, no doubt has something to do with The Ambiguity Of Evil. Those same communication tools are employed by those waving flags, crying, "Freedom...Liberty...Security!" and identifying the enemies upon whom the minions can blame all their problems.
The view from my soapbox is often a bit gloomy on Monday mornings.
Back to Hitchcock, I wonder how significant it is, if at all, that after his two relatively unsuccessful espionage thrillers of the '60s, in which "the bad guy" was represented by pervasive systems rather than by an individual, central villain, he retreated in the '70s to intimate little crime stories even as other directors were exploring a sense of paranoia with shadowy conspiracies depicted in pictures like The Parallax View, Chinatown, Three Days Of the Condor and All the President's Men.
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