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Alfred Hitchcock

A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone

The eyes have it

By Alan Vanneman

See the introduction to this nine-part photo study.

Alfred Hitchcock was, unsurprisingly, fascinated by eyes. Films are about seeing, after all, and often about seeing what we don't see, and aren't allowed to see, in real life. Hitchcock was a compulsive voyeur, and liked to involve the audience in his own obsessions.

Eyes in Hitchcock's films can represent both innocence and depravity. Vertigo begins with a close-up of Kim Novak's eyes, which suggest a sort of frightened helplessness. However, as the camera narrows its gaze to one eye, we get the sense of a loss of control (helped along not a little by dramatic lighting and other special effects).

In Stranger on a Train, a close-up of the eyes of small-town, small-time bad girl Miriam Haines (Laura Elliott, aka Kasey Rogers of later Bewitched fame) reveals her vulnerability just before her murder.

Hitchcock later duplicates this shot with Miriam lookalike Barbara Morton (Patricia Hitchcock).

In Rear Window, Hitchcock uses the light reflected from the glasses of murderer Raymond Burr for a more sinister effect.

Psycho begins with the camera eye roving over Phoenix, eventually entering a window so that we can see Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) with her lover. Afterwards, we see other people staring at Marion.

The dead-eyed stare of the cop sets us up for the death's-head gaze of "Mother," which we won't see for another hour.

Marion stares back helplessly at the cop's unblinking gaze.

She flees the cop as quickly as she can, not realizing that she's falling into the lair of the ultimate voyeur, Norman Bates.

Norman's spy hole suggests an old-fashioned camera obscura and also recalls the very beginning of the film, when we were spying on Marion in another hotel room.

This enormous close-up of Norman's eye will be followed, all too soon, by Marion's dead stare. (If you know something about physiology, you know that if Marion/Janet were really dead, her pupil would be fully dilated.)

At the conclusion of the film, Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) comes face to face with the ultimate deadhead, Mrs. Bates.

In his next picture, The Birds, Hitchcock used a similar image. It's shocking, but it doesn't come as the culmination of the entire film, the way the sight of Mother's skull does in Psycho.

Click any of the links below for additional categories/motifs, or to return to the intro page:

Houses † Staircases † Women's Hair † Hands † Eyes

The Uncanny † The Vortex † Notorious Sequence

The Man Who Knew Too Much Sequence

ALSO: Check out other fine articles and reviews by the author.