Early Hitchcock

Masculinity

In Sabotage the villain of the piece, Verloc, is a timid, ineffectual person, lacking the strength and guile that would befit an anarchic terrorist bomber. As Robin Wood says, in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, ‘central to Hitchcock’s work is the culture’s investment in masculinity, potency, the phallus, and the dread that actual men may not fulfil the demands that masculinist ideology makes on them.’

In Hitchcock the guilty woman is always guilty but the guilty male is often falsely accused. Hitchcock’s is a man’s world which the aberrant woman disrupts. It may be noted too that both murders in Sabotage and Blackmail are by women using a knife; the phallic symbolism of the stabbing weapon in the hands of a woman is a sign of the displacement of masculinity.