Rebecca (1940)

For those who know something of dreams, the famous opening of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940)--"Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again," intoned by our heroine (Joan Fontaine) over gauzy images of a long drive leading up to a magnificent estate--contains a subtle but foreboding surprise. The dream that we are witnessing, of a nocturnal return to Manderley, knows itself to be a delusion: the lights in the windows are only lights cast by the passing moon; the full shapes of its towers, only the aggrandizing effects of shadows. Because this is emphatically not a dream of returning to Manderley, for reasons still to be spelled out. Our anonymous heroine is in fact dreaming of--willing, fantasizing about--Manderley's ruin, its quietude as it lays in ruin, succumbing to the overgrowth of the surrounding wood. And as the scene changes, and we come face to face with the innocent, awkward narrator in earlier days, this dream of ruin becomes a curious one to impute to her fresh youthfulness. And, as dreams tend to, this one too fades away into waking life: I have watched Rebecca a number of times without registering that the opening "gives away" the ending entirely.

Rebecca was Hitchcock's first American film, produced by David O. Selznick fresh off of his success producing (but really directing, writing, and editing) Gone with the Wind (1939). Although Hitchcock had already directed two absolute classics in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and The 39 Steps (1935), the larger Hollywood budget allowed for the casting of the world's greatest living actor, Laurence Olivier, as Maximilian de Winter, as well as for the Manderley set (and its destruction) and an overall less-closeted feel than in Hitch's British films. "Maxim" de Winter is one of Olivier's best roles: a peremptory, moody, haunted Mr. Rochester figure. We first see him evidently contemplating suicide over a cliff's edge at Monte Carlo, with vertiginous images of crashing waves that Olivier would reprise to great effect in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in his Hamlet (1948). Joan Fontaine somehow manages to seem both newborn and twitchingly neurotic as an insecure commoner whom de Winter does not so much seduce as command, liberating her from her demeaning job as a paid companion (to a scene-stealing Florence Bates) and installing her as mistress of the immense Manderley.

Or, she would be mistress of Manderley, except that the mansion is ruled by the ghost of the first Mrs. de Winter (the title character, though never seen) and the eerie, domineering housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, whose allegiances are entirely to the (apparently drowned) first wife. Here we have one of Hitchcock's great themes: the place one finds oneself occupying, which one is manifestly an impostor. Just as Roger Thornhill finds himself being chased "as" Roger Kaplan in North by Northwest (1959), or the impostor Madeleine finds herself compelled by Scottie to dress as the part she plays in the first half Vertigo (1958), or Norman Bates' role as his own mother in Psycho (1960)--though the last of these is scarily effective--the new Mrs. de Winter finds herself installed in a position, a name, and a life which have already begun. In Hitchcock, one is constantly made to acknowledge how much of our lives are willing impostures. What remains is not so much escape (where would we go?) but a battle for dignity, with what little personal force one has at one's command. If Rebecca and Vertigo especially are great films, it is because they express the truth that yes, we are compelled (by the tyrannical eccentricities of an Olivier or a James Stewart) into these ill-fitting roles, but behind this compulsion lies a palpable desperation.

A word about Mrs. Danvers. What makes this woman so terrifying? For many of us, it must be that the suspicion that "British people are really like this"--icily rude, leading us into faux pas, suffocating us with etiquette. Jokes aside, Mrs. Danvers is one of Hitchcock's great villains because her motivation, a servant's faithfulness, would otherwise so obviously be a virtue. Villains in film, if they are of the mustache-twirling variety and motivated by callow selfishness, or of the Darth Vader variety and essentially following orders, may be "bad" enough. But Mrs. Danvers, like Norman Bates, is even scarier: these villains have set up inside themselves that to which they are faithful and of which they are so protective (the first Mrs. de Winter, Mrs. Bates), but with no distinction between "outside" and "inside." The location of evil here, really terrifying evil--and this expressed at the height of Nazi power in Europe--is not blind obedience to an external power, or hateful intolerance, but rather more subtly, the voice of conscience and secure continuity that we set up inside ourselves, what Freud would call the superego. And so it is fitting that it is in dreams of returning to Manderley that even the meek heroine of Rebecca repeatedly secures and masters the end of Rebecca's reign, as though even absolute ruin and decay were still a rather tenuous victory.