BLOOD AND CASH: A Marxian Interpretation of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt
As is the case with all Hitchcock films, the major modern thinker most associated with Shadow of a Doubt is Sigmund Freud. The overt phallic symbols that pop up in nearly every frame, the theme of sexual violence and the thinly-veiled incestuous undertones are all hallmarks of the popular Freudian idiom. Indeed, the entire world of the film is clearly meant as a metaphor for the Freudian schema of the human psyche, which consists of the ego maintaining the appearance of order and calm at the surface, underneath which rages the undomesticated lust and aggression of the id. Uncle Charlie, the outwardly charming serial killer, explicitly embodies this dichotomy in himself, and also reveals it as the true nature of society as a whole with the brutal observations he sometimes allows to slip past his well-maintained appearance of civility. "Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine?" he says to Young Charlie, once she's discovered his secret and he knows he knows there is no use hiding his true self from her any longer—he, like Freud, sees the animal nature that lies behind the thin facade of civilization. It is this subterranean darkness that Hitchcock wants his film to expose; villain though he may be, Uncle Charlie is the nonetheless the director's critical mouthpiece.
As apt as the Freudian reading is, however, the film also bears strong traces of another giant of modern thought who shared Freud's talent for recognizing human civilization as an extension of the natural world: Karl Marx. Like Freud, Marx had the clarity of vision to see straight through to the heart of things where most people only touch the surface. But instead of focusing on the repressed sexual complexes of individuals in society, as Freud did, Marx fixed his gaze upon the economic conditions of society as a whole, and came to similar conclusions. Just as Freudian psychoanalysis repudiated the conception of man as a fundamentally rational, harmonious being, which had dominated Enlightenment philosophy, Marx's thought repudiated the harmonious and rational picture of the capitalist economic system painted by Adam Smith. For Marx, there was nothing harmonious about the economy; on the contrary, at all stages of history the economic conditions had arisen from conflict between social classes. If the economy appears harmonious, it is only because economists tend to be members of the social class that benefits from it. They merely create the appearance of economic harmony, just as the ego creates the appearance of psychical harmony to mask its constant struggle to suppress the id.
Although Marx's theory of class conflict is probably his most well-known idea, his longer works go much further in dismantling the illusion of economic harmony. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, his first major attempt at a comprehensive critique of capitalism, he strikes at its roots by attacking its most fundamental illusion: the equation of value with capital. In reality, says Marx, the value of anything for human beings is determined by the specific human need it satisfies: food is valuable insofar as it satisfies hunger—it is not useful for any other purpose. Fuel, clothing, and building materials all have similarly determinate values—there are as many different types of value as there are different needs. Capitalism does away with this diversity by subsuming all determinate, real values under one abstract, imaginary value: capital. And the more capitalism takes hold of society, the more people are forced to accept this illusion as reality. Eventually, they forget entirely about the reality underneath the illusion of capital, just as the civilized ego has forgotten entirely about the id. It is such a society, in which the "intrinsic" value of capital goes unquestioned, that we see depicted in Shadow of a Doubt.
In this paper I will show, using the Manuscripts as a theoretical framework, how Shadow of a Doubt offers an incisive critique of capitalism. I am not suggesting that my Marxian reading is "better" than the standard Freudian one. Rather, I hope to show how the two readings are mutually inclusive. The film medium, because of its similarity to the dream-image, lends itself naturally to Freudian interpretation; Hitchcock was well aware of this, and made conscious use of the vocabulary of psychoanalytic symbolism in his films. In Shadow of a Doubt, I will argue, he uses this established method of "encoding" hidden meanings to express a message about capitalism that is more indebted to Marx than Freud. At the same time, he uses the aforementioned similarities between Freud and Marx to draw an analogy between the illusion of the ego and the illusion of capital. By using psychoanalytic tropes to disrupt the illusion of capital, Shadow of a Doubt shows how deeply it has penetrated into the American bourgeois cultural system, and exposes the falseness of institutions and cultural practices that people accept so uncritically as "normal."
Like its Freudian allegory, the film's critique of capitalism finds its clearest expression in Uncle Charlie, most obviously in his strange disregard for money. As the film opens, we first see him lying on a bed—in the position of a patient undergoing analysis, and holding in his hand the iconic Freudian cigar. The next shot, however, shows a wad of crumpled bills lying on his bedside table, and then pans down to show more cash strewn carelessly on the floor. The chambermaid then enters the frame and scolds Uncle Charlie for leaving money lying around; he casually dismisses her. In interpreting these two images—the Freudian pose and the money—we must bear in mind that the former is a message from the director, letting us know that he will be using a Freudian visual idiom; for those viewers familiar with Hitchcock, this is surely old news. The latter image, however, tells us the very first thing we learn about Uncle Charlie himself: he does not care about money. The chambermaid provides further emphasis: the way Uncle Charlie treats money is not normal. We could interpret this opening sequence as follows: the director will employ Freudian visual symbolism in the film formally, but the content of the film will be a challenge to the value of money.
Money, according to Marx, is "the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life" (102). Money mediates every interaction between human beings and the world—they never experience the world directly, but only through the deadening filter of capital. The human value of things, their capacity to satisfy specific needs, gives way to general, abstract, monetary value; this abstraction comes to dehumanize the world. In the world of Shadow of a Doubt, many people can no longer see past the filter at all; the only quality they can perceive is monetary value. The best example of this sort of capitalist myopia in the film is Joe. Joe works at a bank; his profession is only possible as long as people swallow whole the falsehood of money. His own inability to see past monetary value is thrown into relief when he interacts with the two Charlies, both of whom have more discerning vision. In Young Charlie's first scene, when she complains that the family is "in a terrible rut," Joe tries to console her by reminding her that he recently got a raise. "Money?" she replies, "How can you talk about money when I'm talking about people's souls?" Joe looks puzzled; the distinction is lost on him. Later, when Uncle Charlie brings out a bottle of wine, he quotes St. Paul: "Take some wine for thy stomach's sake." When Joe looks at the bottle, all he can say is "Hmm...imported." While Uncle Charlie sees the wine specifically as a drink, emphasizing its human value, Joe sees only its value only as an expensive commodity. It is worth noting that both Charlies counter Joe's fixation on money with religious language, harkening back to Marx's description of religion as "the soul of soulless conditions"—conditions that people like Joe are wholly incapable of recognizing as soulless.
Young Charlie, as we have seen, is able to see past the fake illusion of money; her uncle not only sees past it but actually hates it, and with such passion that it drives him to kill. The first hint of this hatred is the cash in the first scene. Cash is capital in reified form—that is, imaginary value concretized into a tangible object, making the illusion all the more convincing. The way Uncle Charlie leaves it crumpled on the floor suggests not just carelessness but an intentional desecration. The chambermaid reacts to the sight of the crumpled bills with vehemence, as though Uncle Charlie were doing violence to the world by leaving them like that. His animosity starts to show itself when he visits the bank where Joe works. Losing his self-restraint, he spouts derisive comments, joking loudly about embezzlement and embarrassing Joe terribly. When he says to Joe, "Can you stop embezzling a minute and give me your attention?" Joe understands it as a bad joke. Uncle Charlie is not really joking, though: because he sees money itself as a lie and a deception, to him all banking is merely embezzlement. Bankers have detached fully from the realm of human need—they produce nothing, but only shuffle illusory value, which they take to be real, back and forth. Hitchcock himself weighs in on the matter by showing both Joe and his boss behind bars, Joe in a bank-teller's booth and his boss with the bar-like shadow of his Venetian blinds projected across his face; this is to underscore how they have both allowed themselves to be enslaved by capital.
At the bank, Uncle Charlie encounters Mrs. Potter, a rich widow of the sort we soon find out that he has been murdering. Her flirtatious remark—"The best thing about being a widow is that you don't have to ask your husband for money!"—show us what it is about her kind that makes him want to kill them. Both the remark itself and her reason for saying it—to let Uncle Charlie know she is available—reveal her syndrome: with the power of her inheritance and the freedom of not having a husband, she is devoting her waning years to cheap pleasures. According to Marx, true enjoyment comes from the direct satisfaction of genuine human needs, unmediated by money. The only sort of enjoyment available in a capitalist system is the "artificially produced crudeness" of needs "whose true enjoyment, therefore, is self-stupefaction—this seeming satisfaction of need" (98). The widows engage in neither production nor genuine enjoyment, but only indulge in the "crudeness" of false needs created by the capitalist system. In the speech against rich widows that Uncle Charlie delivers at the dinner table, he specifically mentions that they are "proud of their jewelry but of nothing else"—jewelry being an excellent example of a pleasure whose value is nothing more than the illusory value of capital. He also emphasizes that they are "fat"—like the bankers, they do not produce anything, but only accumulate more and more for themselves. But instead of hoarding their accrual in bank accounts, they pack it onto their bodies, a twisted reversal of the bodily need from which real human value arises. Uncle Charlie kills them because they are living embodiments of the sickness that comes of a society based on false value and the gratification of false needs.
As the example of the self-indulgent widows demonstrates, monetary value is far from the only illusion that capitalism projects, although it is the most fundamental. That is, the false identity of value and capital is the original postulate, out of which grows an entire imaginary world inhabited by deluded people who, as Uncle Charlie tells his niece, "live in a dream." Emma is the film's clearest expression of the fantasy world that capitalism produces. In his discussion of the individual in society, Marx writes that "general consciousness"—that is, one's generalized conception of society as a whole—"is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community...[it] is an abstraction from real life and as such antagonistically confronts it" (86). Emma's general consciousness has fully superseded reality, to such an extent that her ideal of what a normal family should be like totally drowns out her real life, precluding any possibility of antagonistic confrontation. Marx goes on to write that "thinking and being are thus no doubt distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other" (86)—for Emma, this unity is achieved only insofar thinking completely takes the place of being as the determiner of reality. When her house is being photographed as an exemplar of a "typical" American household—that is, a reification of general consciousness—Emma wants them to wait until she's gotten the house just how she wants it, so that it conforms to the imaginary ideal she inhabits. When Uncle Charlie announces that he is going to leave, Emma starts to cry because, she explains, she was so happy about "the idea that we would be together again." It is the idea she cares about, not even her brother himself.
The two young children also contribute to the film's critique of capitalism. Roger, the young boy, shows that he is already fully indoctrinated into the system by his obsession with numbers and calculation. Marx notes that "The quantity of money...[is] its sole effective attribute: just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself...to something merely quantitative" (93). His triumphal announcements that he has counted the number of steps from the corner store to the house, or that he could calculate this or that, are examples of the unwavering confidence in numbers and calculation that is so characteristic of capitalism. By expressing capitalist attitudes with such childlike exaggeration, Roger pushes them to their logical conclusions, exposing their absurdity. Ann is a more complex case. With her "sacred oath" to read two books a week, she exemplifies the sort of Calvinist self-discipline that, according to Max Weber, contributed to the rise of capitalism. But, like her older sister, she is also quite circumspect about her own society. Early in his Critique, Marx writes that the "only wheels which political economy [i.e. capitalism] sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious—competition" (71). Ann demonstrates an intuitive understanding of this principle when she remarks, after Young Charlie says she doesn't want a gift from her uncle, that the girls in her books who "say they don't want anything, always get more in the end." She knows enough about capitalism to be suspicious of an action that claims to be motivated by anything but naked avarice.
To clarify the connection between Freud and Marx in the context of Shadow of a Doubt, we return to Marx's superb metaphor of money as the "pimp" mediating between man and nature. Human beings long for direct, unmediated experience, in this case the real fulfillment of sexual desire in the form of lovemaking. Prostitution, by turning sexual intercourse into a mediated commodity, reduces it to the level of crude pleasure. Similarly, the id longs for direct gratification of its socially unacceptable desires, but the socially constructed ego and superego function, like money, to mediate between the desiring id and its object, maintaining civilization at the expense of the id's continual dissatisfaction. The difference between Marx and Freud, in this context, is that Marx believed that, with the emancipation of the urban proletariat and the annulment of private property, the mediating force of capital would eventually be overcome. Communism would emerge as a truly human society that responded to human needs without mediation. Freud did not share Marx's optimism—he felt that the mediating presence of the ego could only be abolished at the expense of civilization itself. Without the ego, which gives us the capacity to sublimate our animal urges, we would regress to pre-human barbarism.
Numerous thinkers, such as Herbert Marcuse, have attempted fusions of Marxist theory and Freudian psychoanalysis. The goal of Marcuse's "Freudo-Marxism" was to reconcile Freudian psychoanalysis with utopian dynamism of Marx's philosophy of history, to use Freud's insight into the psychology of the individual while attempting to overcome his conclusion that repression is an inescapable fact of life. Hitchcock, it seems, is doing the exact opposite—he makes use of Marx's analysis of capitalism, but pointedly omits his promise of utopian reconcilement. Shadow of a Doubt, in keeping with Marx, shows capitalism to be founded on an illusion; but the reality it obscures is nothing more than the unbridled fury and lust of the id. The id, paradoxically, shows its face both in Uncle Charlie's violent hatred of capitalism, and in the rich widows he murders, who use the spoils of capitalism to gratify their own whims. While Marcuse combined Marx and Freud in an attempt to liberate civilization from the necessity of libidinal repression, Hitchcock uses Marx to effectively deny Freud the possibility of civilization at all. According to Freud, civilization (as opposed to inhuman barbarism) is made possible through the formation of the ego as a mediating force. But capitalism, whose emergence is analogous to that of the ego, leads to inhumanity anyway. Uncle Charlie, who sees through it, becomes an inhuman monster; the widows, who push it to its logical extremes, toss away their humanity in wild self-pleasuring; and everyone else just lives in a state of utterly mediated stasis. In 1943, when the film was released, the world was seeing how fully inhuman brutality could flourish even at the pinnacle of civilization. Except for the barest hints at the redemptive power of religion which I mentioned above, Hitchcock offers us no way out.
All page references are from: Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978.