What interests Hitchcock? Not precisely character: he creates it, and his flair for casting sustains it, but it is character directed to the ends of a limited dramatic situation, star personality cut to size, Not, certainly, professional crime, the mechanics of a bank robbery or the operations of a spy ring. Professionalism hints at routine, and Hitchcock's is the art of the unexpected—a celebration of that jarring moment when, walking in the dark down a staircase which you know every foot of the way, you suddenly hit bottom one step too soon. When Hitchcock talks of his own technique, it is often in terms of a deliberate avoidance of cliché. (p. 161)
What does, then, interest this bland, smooth man? The quirkish, English Hitchcock and the American Hitchcock who deals in the twists and turns of the mind are not perhaps as far apart as they seem. Humour at one end, monomania at the other, are alike in disturbing equilibrium and order. Hitchcock is fascinated, one deduces, by the way unreason keeps breaking in, by the ease with which system can be overturned. But it's the dark of the mind rather than of the soul that concerns him: his own position is that of the rational man for whom the world is a place of sublime and alluring unreason. A smashed cup, however, gives him more to work with than a smashed city; and a weakness of The Birds … is that it seems to be reaching out, however half-heartedly, towards some kind of larger significance….
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