Can Hitchcock be Saved from Hitchcock Studies?

A s Robert Kapsis ha.s noted in Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, Alfred Hitchcock alway.s courted the press. From the early yeans in England working for Michael Balcon at Ciainsborough to his final years in Hollywood working for Lew Wasserman at Universal, Hitchcock attempted to produce and direct critical response to himself and to his work. One of Hitchcock's favorite screenwriters, Charles Bennett, told stories of Hitchct)ck spending his entire weekly salary on elaborate (self-) promotional parties for London's film critics back in the early iy3()s. Hitchcock remained actively engaged in the publicity for and promoliun of his films throughout his career, personally conducting national press tours. It is possible, in other words, to trace the 'Hitchcock Indtistry,' the proHfciation of essays, articles, trade press, a)id academic press books on Hitchcock, back to Hitchcock himself and his attempt to control his construction as a celebrity-entertainer-artist in the media. But Hitchcock has been dead for twenty-three years now. At ihe time of his death, according to Jane Sloan's Alfred Hitcheock: A Guide to References and Sources (1995), there were already over 540 articles and books on Hitchcock, including a handful of essays by Hitchcock himself, numerous interviews with him, and other pieces \spawncd' by ihe director's efforts al generating publicity. We can, perhaps, 'blame' Hitchcock for some of this material. lUu he is nol to be held entirely responsible for whal happened after iiis death. Lroiii then (April 28, 1980) to his centennial in 1999, more than sixty-four new books and 371 new critical essays were published. C'livcn that the 'Hitchcock Industry' really took off during the lODth anniversary of his birth (1999), one could guess that another tweniy-or-so books had been published since then, nol to mention scores of iK•̂ •̂ articles. At any rate, a quick count of books on Hitchcock currently available for sale on Amazon.com indicates eighty-seven new and old book titles. Hooks on Hitchcock sell. For the past twenty-Hve years, since the heyday of high auleuihm, university and trade presses have taken a beating on studies of film directors. But Hitchcock, partly because of his status as a cultural icon and partly because college film courses are regularly devoted to his work, has endured as a sitbiect for popular biographies and scholarly monographs. Robin Wood's hook, Hitchcock's l-ilins, subsequently retilled Hitchcock's Tihns Revisited, is perhaps the best exatnple of Hitchcock's enduring popularity. Originally published (in a green cover edition) by Zwemmcr in 1965, it was reissued in 1969 (in a yellow cover edition that included a chapter on Torn Curtain). A thirii edition came out in 1977 with a "Retiospective" on the earlier editions. In 1989, Columbia University Press reprinted it along with about 200 pages of new material. That edition was revised yet again in 2002 with a new forty-page preface and a new essay on Mamie. Wood's book holds a very special place in llnglish-language scholarship on Hitchcock, being nol only {me of the first such books but also one of the best. At the same time, its various revisions document crucial shifts in films studies as a discipline and provide an important portrait of Hitchcock's role, as a figure of study, in the development of critical paradigms from early (i/i/fHcism, to psychoanalysis, feminism, semiotics (of a sort), and queer studies. There are various ways of accounting for the proliferation of books and essays on Hitchcock. The most obvious explanation would seem to be that Hitchcock's oeuvre merits such attention, Sidney Ciottlieb, coeditor of a journal devoted exclusively to Hitchcock (The Hitchcock Annual) and of a recent anthology of essays from that journal, is one of the few scholars to address the phenomenon of "Hitchcock Studies." He observes that Hitchcock has been "valorized," "institutionalized," "commodified," and "proliferated" as a topic of study. Although he considers the Hitchcock Industry to be a "mixed blessing," the fact is that Hitchcock, like Shakespeare, is a major artist in an art form—the cinema—that has becotne the major artistic medium of the last century. To ensure the continued viability of Hitchcock Studies, Cottlieb then makes a series of recommendations designed to prevent the field from becoming yet anolher instance of cultural commoditlcation, instrunientali^ation, and reiflcation. One of his recommendations could be .said to describe the best of recent work on Hitchcock; it involves "de-centering" Hitchcock—that is, exploring the various "contexts of his work," "...his collaborators, his historical milieu..." A more cynical commentary on llitch-