Hitchcock: Anticipitating Suspense

An Homage to Hitchcock

By Max Griffin

I love films. There is something about sitting in the dark and losing yourself in the panorama unfolding on the big screen. There is a totality to the cinematic experience that engages the senses in ways that the stage and prose cannot. The music and the acting enhance the experience, to be sure, but it is the camera that makes all the difference. The camera becomes my eye, roaming over the scene and the characters, snooping out surprising little details that the players on the screen don't know or see. The most skilled directors use the camera to fold the audience into the narrative, empowering us to imagine and create the story in partnership with the artists creating the cinematic experience.

When I write, I imagine my stories as a movie running through my mind. I think of the scenes and descriptions in terms of what the camera would see, and hear a soundtrack playing in my head. So, last week when the American Film Institute released lists of the "Top Ten Films" in various genres, I thought of cinematic influences on my writing. The AFI "Mystery" genre turned out to contain some of my favorite films: "Vertigo," "Rear Window," "North by Northwest," and "Dial M for Murder," among others. It should come as no surprise that Alfred Hitchcock directed four of the ten "Top Ten" movies in the Mystery genre. In fact, Hitchcock's theories about suspense and the psychology of the camera's eye influence my stories in ways that are both explicit and subtle. When I remember Hitchcock's lessons, my stories have greater emotional impact and higher levels of suspense. When I forget those lessons, my prose falls flat no matter how clever my plot, how lyrical my writing, or how quirky my characters might be.

So, what are those lessons? I think the first, and most important lesson, is that the story happens in the mind of your audience. The characters, the dialog, the mise en scene, all of these are devices to draw your audience in and make them your partner in imagining your story. In films, the director has the camera, with all the tricks of angle and zooming, along with the music, the expression on the actor's face, the sound effects, and many other details to achieve this fundamental goal. On the printed page, the task is both harder and simpler. It's harder since everything must happen in the reader's imagination: there is no score, there are no actors, there is no Foley artist. But it's easier too, because the author can saturate the reader's senses by describing all of these things and more. Many authors forget, for example, to include scent in their stories, yet this is one of the most powerful and intimate of all our sensations. In any case, keeping the reader actively and emotionally engaged in the story is the first, and most fundamental, job of the author.

Hitchcock downplayed both plot and dialog in his movies. That doesn't mean these are unimportant, for he recognized that people will identify with characters, even villains. Hitchcock once said, “People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another. A conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs.” In film, the camera's eye can reveal what is happening in the character's mind despite what he or she is saying. A famous example happens in the opening scenes of "Notorious." The camera starts with a wide shot of a party and we hear a trivial conversation between Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. How boring. But while they talk the camera zooms in on the two of them, and then continues with a slow but inevitable gaze down to a close-up of Bergman's fingers flipping nervously with a set of keys hidden in the folds of her skirt. We know from the eye of the camera that Bergman is hiding something, and these keys must play a role in her deception. This is no longer boring, but rather intriguing: the director has introduced both mystery and suspense. The author does the same thing in a well-written story, picking and choosing which details to describe and which to leave to the mind's eye of the reader. The reader is engaged by incomplete information which creates suspense. Even the most pedestrian of stories needs suspense, else the reader will become bored and move on to something more engaging.

Consider "Rear Window." Here, the journalist played by Jimmie Stewart mimics the audience: he sits in his apartment and imagines stories about the neighbors outside his window, as if watching a real-world movie. Eventually he draws his girl friend and his health care worker into his voyeuristic imaginings. Meanwhile, we, the audience, are the real voyeurs, watching in the darkness as the story of the voyeur on the screen unfolds. What drives this story is not his broken leg, nor the mystery centered on the Raymond Burr character. What drives this are the little tragedies: Miss Lonelyhearts, the young marrieds, the party girl, and broken relationship between Stewart's and Grace Kelley's characters. Everything else is an excuse for us, the voyeurs in the audience, to spy on the lives exposed on the screen. We don't care so much about what happens as about the people caught up in their individual, lonely sagas.

Hitchcock didn't exactly disdain plot; what he recognized is that the plot is something the characters care about, while the audience cares about the characters. Characters need plot devices to set them in motion and to give them a reason for speaking and acting; Hitchcock was interested in the psychology of the characters, not the love affair that made them steal a fortune from their boss, as in "Psycho," or the crimes they are hiding, as in "Shadow of Doubt." He called these plot devices a "MacGuffin" to emphasize that they are just a tool and not central to the task of engaging the imagination of the audience. In "Vertigo," the plot device is a detective trailing the mentally ill wife of a client. This is just an excuse -- and not a very interesting or plausible one -- to set in motion the haunting interactions between the Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak characters. In "North by Northwest," the Leo G. Carrol character says of the spies, "Well, let's say he's an importer and exporter. What of? Government secrets." That's enough explanation, since in this movie it is the chase and the mistaken identity that matter, not the "secrets" tht the James Mason character steals. I like reading science fiction too, but all too often in SciFi the story and characters hang on the MacGuffin rather than the other way around; clever technology or sociology is just a MacGuffin unless the eye is focused on the characters. I'm far more interested in the personal implications of, say, teleportation, than the technicalities about how it might work. Well, I confess as a scientist, I'm interested in the latter too, but not in a work of fiction.

With respect to suspense, perhaps the most important lesson Hitchcock teaches us is the difference between shock and suspense. Peter Bogdanovich, in his New York Times homage to Hitchcock in 1999 relates the following quote from the master:

''We come to our old analogy of the bomb. You and I sit here talking. We're having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn't mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! A bomb goes off and the audience is shocked -- for 15 seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, show that a bomb has been placed there, establish that it's going to go off at 1 P.M. -- it's now a quarter of one, ten of one -- show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. Look under the table! You fool! Now the audience is working for 10 minutes, instead of being surprised for 15 seconds.''

A more terse summary is the Hitchcock aphorism, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Of course, it is the audience which anticipates the bang -- the characters must be unaware of that it is coming. In "Psycho," for example, the audience learns about the psychotic Mother before the Martin Balsam character enters the house on the hill. We know, but he does not, that a crazed killer awaits as he climbs the stairs. That makes the scene one of the most suspenseful in all of cinema.

"Psycho" also teaches a lesson most forgotten and most needed in cinema and fiction today: don't show the bomb going off! In the famous shower sequence, we never see the knife strike. The director reveals the attack through a sequence of quick cuts, slashing back and forth so the audience imagines the knife cutting, but never sees it strike its victim. When the attack is over, the camera focuses on Janet Leigh's character's now dead, unblinking eye and her lifeblood whirling down the drain. The audience is left to imagine, but to never see, her horrific wounds. This is much worse, and much more terrifying, than an explicit image of a brutalized body.

There are many more lessons to be learned from the Master of Suspense, far too many for such a short essay as this. His theories and innovations changed cinema forever, and his influence echoes throughout popular culture today. His dark vision inspires the movies that play in mind and that I transcribe so imperfectly to the pages of my stories. His relentless eye always remained focused on humanity and on those impulses that lend both sorrow and joy to our lives. His dramatic insights continue to inform and entertain. He was and remains an artistic genius.