Robin Wood begins the introduction to his 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films with a question: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” It’s a deceptively simple query; as I glance at my book shelf, I see no less than 10 books on the filmmaker — Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films Revisited; Rohmer & Chabrol’s Hitchcock; A Hitchcock Reader, edited by Deutelbaum & Poague; Durgnat’s A Long, Hard Look at Psycho; the canonical long-form interview Hitchcock/Truffaut; Walker’s Hitchcock’s Motifs; Krohn’s Hitchcock at Work; and so on and so forth. There must be few filmmakers who have captured the popular and academic mind as much as Hitch, whose vast filmography spans the silent era through every major technical innovation of the medium. A populist artist in the truest sense of the word, a maker of enormously successful entertainment who nonetheless tackled our collective fears, desires, and kinks, possessor of a self-reflexive tendency that revealed (and reveled in) the mechanics of how we view and process motion pictures, a gifted storyteller and keen visual thinker. The 20th century is, in large part, chronicled by and through Hitch, including decades of theory on auteurism, feminism, authorship, sexual deviancy, Scopophilia, and abuse. As Poague writes, “to speak of Alfred Hitchcock is to evoke a remarkable series of histories.” To answer Wood’s question, then, is a simple matter of “why wouldn’t we take Hitchcock seriously?” It makes plenty of sense that documentarian/essayist Mark Cousins would be attracted to such a subject. What makes less sense is what Cousins thought he was contributing to the already vast collective knowledge of the man and his films. Unfortunately, the evidence at hand, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, suggests that Cousins has little to say about anything of substance.
Cousins made his name, so to speak, with the epic, multi-part The Story of Film series from 2011, based on his own book published in 2004. It’s a light, airy exercise, the sort of thing that flatters audiences while mostly eliding experimental, non-narrative film and video and spending inordinate time on mainstream figures like Christopher Nolan. Still, one could argue that it serves a useful pedagogical function, particularly for those curious about film who don’t want to commit to university studies. One expects omissions and blind spots when trying to conduct a survey of an entire medium, even when that survey takes up something like 15 hours of screen time. More troublesome is when Cousins narrows his focus and still manages to gloss over or otherwise mis-characterize a filmmaker’s body of work. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes in his criticism of Cousins’ The Eyes of Orson Welles, “we already know… that the presumptions of Cousins know no natural boundaries apart from his own hubris.” Welles is constructed in part to act as a “dialogue” between Cousins and Orson, as the documentarian speaks directly to the deceased director as if they are pen pals. It’s crystal clear that Cousins believes Welles to be a genius — he utters the word numerous times. It also eventually becomes clear that Cousins seeks to put himself on the same level as Welles, as if some of that genius can’t help but transfer itself to him via osmosis. Cousins attempts something similar with My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, organizing the film around one gigantically misguided choice that haunts everything that comes after; here, Cousins has written a script to be read aloud by a Hitchcock impersonator, so that the film acts as the man himself addressing the audience directly. It’s a shatteringly awful gambit, one that creates an impenetrable distance between any ideas Cousins wishes to explore and his viewers. It’s a ghastly, fake resurrection, only a stone’s throw away from something like generative A.I. (much of the film unspools as if written via ChatGPT, frankly). While the end credits list actor Alistair McGowan as the voice of Hitch, the opening credits flatly state “written and voiced by Alfred Hitchcock,” turning the whole endeavor into an extended gag — a joke without a punchline.
Hitchcock was, like Welles, a showman, making it sometimes difficult to disentangle tall tales and exaggeration from the truth of a matter. Hitch made himself into a brand, and Cousins seems to take that brand at face value. But Hitch was often reticent to speak about the deeper meanings of his films, repeating a few stories over and over and always indulging in jokes and witticisms. As Truffaut writes in the preface to his long-form interview with the director, “It was obvious that Hitchcock… had been victimized in American intellectual circles because of his facetious response to interviewers and his deliberate practice of deriding their questions.” Cousins’ dubious interpretation of Hitch has the director hamming it up as if he’s conducting a two-hour introduction to one of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents television episodes. It’s pithy and occasionally even entertaining, but also frustratingly simplistic. Like the Welles film, Hitchcock is divided into various chapters, although they tend to obfuscate as much as they illuminate. Chapter 1 is titled “Escape,” Chapter 2 is labeled “Desire,” etc. Cousins jumps from film to film, spanning decades in a single cut, teasing out recurring images and motifs. Some of these are of interest; Hitchcock’s penchant for tracking the camera behind a character as they walk through a door, “entering” the space with them, is evocative; less interesting is a montage of shots that show shadows in the shape of prison bars cast over performers faces (this is used to illustrate how these characters are “imprisoned”). Elsewhere, Cousins can’t help but play armchair psychologist; he has his constructed Hitch utter howlers like “I like to escape conventions, escape from myself,” or “I studied desire like Darwin studied earthworms,” While the end credits state that much of Hitchcock’s “dialogue” is constructed of actual quotes cobbled from various sources, Cousins doesn’t cite any of them, leaving viewers who might wish to do further research high and dry in the process. It’s also fairly obvious where Cousins has inserted his own words, often having Hitchcock speak from a future vantage point while reflecting back to the work, like when he starts speaking about “what your modern physicists would call mirror neurons,” or complaining about cell phones, “your little ticking time bombs” and “dial ‘D’ for distraction.” The prose is awfully purple here, and preposterously literal. Hitchcock states flatly, “I want to be omniscient,” this as a montage of various bird’s eye view shots plays out. And later, viewers are gifted “Film is a trickster medium, I am a trickster.”
There’s no doubt that Cousins genuinely loves Hitchcock’s work, and that passion is on full display here. But this film is at least as much about Cousins’ ego as it is the master’s oeuvre. Vaguely, haphazardly organized and occasionally quite dumb, viewers are being sold a bill of goods with My Name is Alfred Hitchcock. Of course, the best education is simply watching the films themselves, or by seeking out writings by Wood and the Cahiers du Cinéma critics of the ’50s. There are plenty of video essays out there that are more erudite, more carefully considered in their analysis. Cousins has made a silly pop confection, marred by attempting to speak for a great artist and presuming that one can “get inside their head.” How self-aggrandizing!
DIRECTOR: Mark Cousins; CAST: Alistair McGowan; DISTRIBUTOR: Cohen Media Group; IN THEATERS: October 25; RUNTIME: 2 hr.
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