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Class struggle is the last thing most people would associate with Alfred Hitchcock, probably the most famous director of them all. But there is a connection, nevertheless. No one would call Hitchcock a socialist; he emphasized that all he wanted was to entertain people - not instruct them. He was proud of his commercial success (and so were the studios that employed him).1 He made cynical- sounding remarks about manipulating authences, and he never bothered with deep-level interpretation of his films. It is true that his movies of the war period (1939-45) are conspicuously antifascist, Lifeboat most of all, but the common view is that Hitchcock is essentially apolitical. "You generally avoid any politics in your films," the French director François Truffaut said to him, and Hitchcock's reply sums up his attitude: "It's just that the public doesn't care for films on politics."2 He has nothing against it, but it is not what the public wants. It is significant that even Lifeboat was accused by some critics oí supporting the Nazis.3
Academics typically discuss everything about Hitchcock, except class - class not in a quasi-cultural sense, but in the technical and Marxist sense of class, with related themes of surplus extraction, alienation, imrniseration, and revolution, implied in the term.4 As John Grant puts it, "the notion of 'class' is a dirty word in today's America."5 Critics notice the "dark side" of American society, plainly depicted in Hitchcock's Hollywood movies; they discuss the alienation and cynicism, the satire, even nihilism, in his films. But the possibility that the alienation in his movies is a function of economic and class issues hardly registers. What they focus on is the sort of thing that academics have a penchant for, often psychoanalysis, with its ever-complicating webwork of infant sexuality, Oedipal rages, anal sadism, castration anxiety, the "family romance" (a misnomer if ever there was one), phallic mothers and penis babies, and other exciting esoterica. Class dynamics tell us a lot more.
For many, it will sound absurd to claim that Hitchcock has anything to do with class struggle. It is an interesting reaction, because issues that are a function of class struggle are plainly on view in Hitchcock, even if they are ignored - or blocked out. Many of...