With Rebecca, the "Hitchcock touch," which has previously been merely a distinguishing feature, becomes a vision of the world. Spontaneity submits to a system. This is a critical moment for an artist, for he must not develop tics, a pedagogical fury. Hitchcock was to avoid these traps. From now on, the two poles of his future work—because we can now talk of a body of work—are clear. One is fascination, moral captation—in other words, depersonalization, schism: in psychoanalytic terms, schizophrenia; in philosophic terms, amoralism; in Baudelairean terms, the assumption of evil, damnation. The other pole is its opposite: knowledge—or, more exactly, reknowledge—of self, unity of being, acceptance, confession, absolute communion. (p. 58)
Alfred Hitchcock's stories come from a great variety of sources, but very early on, he began to alter them in his own way, setting to work on the double job of purifying and enriching them. First he trims the basic idea to bring out a pure relation of force between the characters. Once this has been established, he draws from it, like so many consequences of this relationship, each of the events of the plot. Generally speaking, this deduction operates on two parallel levels, the physical and the moral, and establishes a relation of symbol to idea. (pp. 106-07)
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