To-Night “Golden Curls”: Murder and Mimesis in Hitchcock’s The Lodger
- To-Night “Golden Curls”Murder and Mimesis in Hitchcock’s The Lodger
Alfred Hitchcock’s first cinematic success, The Lodger (1926, silent), provides a case study of contagious violence in the modern metropolis. The film is ostensibly a crime thriller centered on the search for the Avenger, a serial killer modeled on Jack the Ripper. But Hitchcock raises the stakes by introducing a love plot in which the detective and the suspected killer compete for the same woman, who may or may not be the slayer’s next target. In the course of this triangular struggle, the hostility between rivals for the same object of desire escalates to the point of eroding any secure distinction between the cop and the killer, innocence and guilt, legal authority and criminal transgression. As if in homage to René Girard before his time, Hitchcock also explores the larger social implications of this triangular conflict of desire, which spreads infectiously into the public domain and leads to a climax of sacrificial victimization—the near-crucifixion of the “wrong man” by the frenzied crowd—that transforms the hunt for the Avenger into the disclosure of the avenger who resides in every one of us, before arriving at its somewhat contrived and commercially motivated conclusion. As we shall see, however, beyond this [End Page 181] staging of the immemorial cycle of rivalry and ritual sacrifice, Hitchcock has something of his own to say about the distinctively modern operations of mimetic desire, its exploitation by the machinery of entertainment, fashion, and other industries, and its amplification and dissemination by a well integrated network of high-speed mass media, which together have transformed the fabric of modern urban life.
I
Hitchcock’s film is based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’ best-selling novel, The Lodger (1913), which harks back in turn to the sensational Whitechapel murders that terrorized London in the summer and fall of 1888 and established Jack the Ripper as the archetype of the modern serial killer.1 In the novel, a strange gentleman appears at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, former servants now eking out a living in their London lodging house. Most of the story is devoted to Mrs. Bunting and her growing suspicion that her new boarder may be the notorious Avenger, who imitates his historical prototype by preying on London’s ladies of the night. Mrs. Bunting remains silent, however, even as her apprehensions escalate; the rental income has warded off the specter of the poorhouse, and as a lifelong maidservant Mrs. Bunting is deferential and somewhat protective of her gentleman lodger. Two other characters—Daisy, the Buntings’ 18-year-old daughter, and Joe, her policeman boyfriend—will loom large in Hitchcock’s adaptation, but here they are part of the supporting cast in a drama that centers on Mrs. Bunting and her mysterious tenant, whose all-consuming “religious mania” grows increasingly evident to those around him, until eventually he disappears into the London fog.
Hitchcock and his scriptwriter, Eliot Stannard, retained the same constellation of characters, but dramatically altered the original story, with some additional pressure from the studio.2 As in the novel, a mysterious stranger enters a London home, but in Hitchcock’s version, Daisy and the lodger (played by heartthrob Ivor Novello) are instantly drawn to each other, thereby establishing a progressively antagonistic rivalry with Joe, who is at once Daisy’s lover and a detective assigned to the Avenger case. Most of Hitchcock’s ten silent films revolve around the time-honored topos of the love triangle, but The Lodger introduces a more complex pattern—a double plot constituted by a triangular conflict in which each of the three protagonists simultaneously plays two distinct (though significantly overlapping) roles.3 Hence the lodger, Daisy, and Joe are locked in a classic [End Page 182] love triangle, but superimposed on this configuration is a murder triangle formed by the same three characters in their respective roles as suspected killer, prospective victim, and police detective (figure 1). In this form of double-plotting the lodger is at once a romantic rival for Daisy’s hand and possibly a pathological killer; Daisy is the object of romantic desire...
