The Man Who Knew More Than Too Much
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of thinking that made the technique eloquent and inseparable from the narrative the technique creates. The third is constituted by a very, very small group, filmmakers who understood Hitchcock, who didn’t imitate him but absorbed the way he understood and expressed the world in cinematic terms. There are really only two—although Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and David Fincher’s Seven (1996) and The Game (1997) might be included as films that recognize Hitchcock’s irony and image-making strength. One is an original member of the French New Wave, whose work is not well known in the United States, Claude Chabrol. He coauthored the first full-length study of Hitchcock’s films, and many of his own contain a subtle morality of violence that recognizes the Hitchcockian state of mind. The other is Martin Scorsese himself. The difference between these filmmakers and the imitators is that they were able to understand the essential darkness, pessimism, and misanthropy of Hitchcock’s vision. They grasp the complex moral structure of his films that insisted good and evil were reflections of one another and that the seemingly ordered world was always vulnerable to an unforeseen eruption of chaos. They comprehend the delicate balance between order and chaos, which, Hitchcock saw, almost always tipped vertiginously toward the latter. They know, as well, that filmic expression can be used to create a fictive world that reflects realities unfathomable, unable to be perceived, in daily life. I will concentrate on Scorsese, who, in two films, caught the Hitchcockian spirit. The first, Cape Fear, has little to do with Psycho, even though its 1962 original did. Scorsese’s remake largely drops most, but not all, direct Psycho references (although he uses Herrmann’s score and Saul Bass’s wife, Elaine, for the credits) and concentrates on larger Hitchcockian concerns of doubling—in this case of the not-so-moral lawyer, Sam Bowden, and his monstrous, psychotic other, Max Cady. Just as Hitchcock used an abstract pattern to underpin the structure of Psycho, Scorsese uses the images of at least two other Hitchcock films to underpin his own: Stage Fright (1950) and Strangers on a Train (1951). The latter in particular is a film about doubles,