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Otto Rank tells us: the most prominent symptom of the forms which the double takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, . . . the detached personification of instincts and desires, . . . once felt to be unacceptable, but which can be satisfied without responsibility in this indirect way.3 By using the double, authors can externalize and resolve moral tensions, as well as create worlds full of dramatic conflict. The world of the double, being the realm of the subconscious, possesses many characteristics of the dream world, or its perverted mirror image, the nightmare world of the modem thriller, where the normal rules of reason no longer apply, . . . a spectrum of realities having the common characteristic of strangeness and varying from the comic through the absurd, the sinister, and the daemonic, to the explicitly sane.

What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.

Alfred Hitchcock to Francois Truffaut

Plautus, Shakespeare, Hitchcock- a formidable, unlikely threesome, but nevertheless, thematic bedfellows of a sort. In widely spaced times and highly varied environments, each has focused attention on the phenomenon of mistaken identity; all have dabbled in doubles. But though Shakespeare is closer in time and culture to Hitchcock, we instinctivelv link Shakespeare with Plautus because, put simply, "something happened" between Shakespeare's day and our own to change the complexion of the double and throw its shadow darker and larger across our imaginations. That "something" has been identified by Harry Tucker:

Psychology, as we know it today, had its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth. The quest into the mind is simultaneously the quest into the individuality and integrity of the self, which can exhibit puzzling contradictions and obscurely understood drives and impulses. It is not surprising, then, that the theme of the double prominently appeared just when introspective German Romanticism was nascent and that it continued to appear along with the development of psychology into an independent discipline. Major wars and other extensive disturbances of society are among those occasions which cause man to ask himself fundamental questions about his identity-an identity which he finds existing on various levels or even in fragmentation.1

It is in fragmentation, subjective doubling by division, as Robert Rogers categorizes it, that the double chiefly reveals itself in literature after 1800. The more overt examples are actual duplicates who are physically identical: the mirror image of Poe's William Wilson, the mischievous shadow in Anderson's fairy tales, the portrait surrogate of Wilde's Dorian Gray. But latent doubles abound more subtly in Dostoevski and Conrad, where the similarities are spiritual rather than physical. As Rogers points out, "the representing doubles in these tales have a more or less autonomous existence on the narrative level . . . and yet are patently fragments of one mind at the psychological level of meaning." 2 This type of double exists as a defense mechanism for the ego, enabling the self to deal with tensions which it could not otherwise handle in primarily moral conflicts. Otto Rank tells us:

the most prominent symptom of the forms which the double takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, . . . the detached personification of instincts and desires, . . . once felt to be unacceptable, but which can be satisfied without responsibility in this indirect way.3

By using the double, authors can externalize and resolve moral tensions, as well as create worlds full of dramatic conflict.

The world of the double, being the realm of the subconscious, possesses many characteristics of the dream world, or its perverted mirror image, the nightmare world of the modem thriller, where "the normal rules of reason no longer apply, . . . a spectrum of realities having the common characteristic of "strangeness" and varying from the comic through the absurd, the sinister, and the daemonic, to the explicitly sane."4 The suitability of such an environment for cinematic exploration is obvious, and soon found concrete embodiment in the films of the German expressionists of the twenties and thirties- Mumau, Lange, Mayer, and Ulmer. It was in their studio in Munich that the young Alfred Hitchcock directed his first films for Michael Balcon in 19251926. German expressionism grew up to become film noir while Hitchcock worked and watched, and clips from his films would make accurate illustrations for a textbook on the themes, lighting, and framing techniques of both movements.

A survey of Hitchcock's films reveals only two overt uses of the double: The Wrong Man, where Manny Balestrerò (Henry Fonda) is arrested for a series of thefts committed by a man who looks uncannily like him; and Vertigo, where Kim Novak plays two girls, Madeleine and Judy, who turn out to be the same person. Although Foreign Correspondent presents us with an imposter look-alike diplomat, he is "assassinated" in the opening section of the film. There are, however, a multitude of latent doubles in Hitchcock's morally ambiguous universe. Only three films can be dealt with here: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), and North by Northwest (1959). These three provide insights into the variations Hitchcock works on the double, although they certainly do not exhaust his use of it. In addition to the thematic doubling obvious in these films Hitchcock relies heavily on the technique of doubling, that is the paralleling and reversing of scenes. To an amazing degree, then, form and content merge in these films to communicate meaning.

The transference of guilt theory, first elaborated by the French critics Rohmer and Chabrol, and later expanded by Douchet and Truffaut, is too well known to go into here. It has occasioned a controversy still raging, with polarities represented by the French critics in strong support and at one end through Robin Wood, who accepts it with reservations somewhere in the middle, to Raymond Durgnat at the other end, who rejects it as too Catholic and metaphysical for Hitchcock's tastes. It is possible, however, to explore Hitchcock's use of the double without specifically dealing with it by relying instead on observations he has made about the nature of good and evil and the world they cohabit.

Although Hitchcock would probably deny he is a metaphysician, he recognizes that his films do pivot on moral dilemmas. In discussing Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock told both Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut that

there is a moral judgment in the film. He's [Uncle Charlie's] destroyed at the end, isn't he? The niece accidentally kills her uncle. What it boils down to is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white; there are grays everywhere.5

So Hitchcock realizes his world is not one of clear-cut moral alternatives, but one where ambiguity reigns. As Richard Schickel has observed, "the implication [is] . . . that the protagonist, though he may not be guilty of the crime he has been accused of, is indeed guilty of something."6 The double manifests this ambiguity. The heroes compromise themselves during the film, and Hitchcock purposely makes the villains attractive for two reasons. The first is realistic: if they weren't attractive, how would they get near their victims in the first place?;7 and the second is artistic: if they weren't attractive, how could he get the audience to identify with them?

This matter of audience identification is of central importance to Hitchcock and accounts for the large proportion of first person or subjective shots in his films, and for the alternating of objective and subjective camera work that characterizes their structure. Hitchcock has emphasized that his primary appeal is emotional, and that his aim is control over the audience. As Leo Braudy explains,

Hitchcock manipulates our desire to sympathize and identify. He plays malevolently on the audience assumption that the character we sympathize with most, whose point of view we share, is the same character who is morally right in the story the movie tells.8

When we see through a person's eyes, share that person's perception, we assume his identity; if the person is compromised during the course of the film, we are also compromised. The effect is summarized by Robin Wood:

One can point to the disturbing quality of so many Hitchcock films. . . . Many refer to this quality in Hitchcock but few try to account for it: How often has one heard that a certain film is "very clever" but "leaves a nasty taste in the mouth." This "nasty taste" phenomenon has. I believe, two main causes. One is Hitchcock's complex and disconcerting moral sense, in which good and evil are seen to be so interwoven as to be virtually inseparable, and which insists on the existence of evil impulses in all of us. The other is his ability to make us aware, perhaps not quite at a conscious level (it depends on the spectator), of the impurity of our own desires. The two usually operate, of course, in conjunction.9

As a result, we as audience also become doubles of the characters we see.

Just as Hitchcock's characters may be fragmented, so the world in which they live is seen as essentially chaotic, merely overlain with a veneer of stability of which it is the perverted mirror image. As Hitchcock remarked to Schickel, "evil is complete disorder,"10 and in his films evil invades lives randomly and when least expected. Lindsay Anderson encapsulates the typical Hitchcock plot: "These films gain a particular excitement from their concern with ordinary people (or ordinary-looking people) who are plunged into extraordinary happenings in the most ordinary places."! 1 As Hitchcock impishly remarks, we are all afraid of dark streets and sinister locales, but who would feel threatened in an empty rural cornfield or a spotless white motel bathroom? Ironically it is in these innocuous settings that the true danger, "the terror of the familiar turned lethal."1 2 lurks. Icons of stability, the trappings of church in The Man Who Knew Too Much, and state in Strangers on a Train and North by Norhtwest are not only insufficient to prevail against the chaos, but often identify locales where it abounds.

Along with the characters with whom they identify, the audience is plunged into a world of mirrors where nothing is what it seems, and there is nothing to hold on to; the alternating of subjective and objective camera work only serves to further disorient the viewer. Although order appears to be restored at the end of the film, we are not really reassured, because we have seen it so easily disrupted, reinforcing what Robin Wood calls "the theme of the precariousness and vulnerability of the little order we can make in our lives."1 3 In the final analysis, "Hitchcock does not offer any solution to the anarchical madness presented in many of his films. How does one defend oneself against the protagonist of Psychoby locking the bathroom door?"14 To defend himself against the chaotic world, however, Hitchcock shoots most of his films in the studio, and relies heavily on process shots; that way he can depend on the environment remaining orderly and controlled.

Hitchcock's vision of the world is exemplified by the way he uses physical objects in his films. Amid the chaos, innocent items like an emerald ring (Shadow of a Doubt), a key (Notorious), a cigarette lighter (Strangers on a Train) or a locket (Vertigo) can assume sinister significance, a seemingly malevolent life of their own. Hitchcock often resorts to trickery: he uses magnifier props (the gun in Spellbound) or gimmicks (the light bulb hidden in the glass of milk in Suspicion) to establish their importance. As Andrew Sarris points out, these objects thus acquire the weight of visual correlatives in the film, Is representing more complex realities beneath the film's surface: the struggle for power between characters, or the pervasiveness of evil in their world. Hitchcock's use of montage isolates and emphasizes these objects, thereby illustrating and reinforcing the fragmentation of the chaos world. In the final analysis, it is this fragmentation which makes doubling both possible and plausible.

Shadow of a Doubt seems like an apt title for a film about doubles. Made in 1943, the film is one of Hitchcock's favorites and is often identified as Hitchcock's first American film, since his earlier American films had either been set abroad or featured English actors. However, its "Americanness" really consists in its attempt, Hitchcock's first, to investigate the American heartland and penetrate the surfaces of its small-town complacency. Thornton Wilder assisted with the script, and Hitchcock insisted the film be shot on location in Santa Rosa to assure "realism"; the resulting film is a perverse mirror image of Our Town, where middle-class staircases and innocent garages become locations for murder attempts.

The doubles in the film are Uncle Charlie (Joseph Gotten) and his niece, Young Charlie (Teresa Wright). They are linked not only by their family relationship and identical names, but also by a certain telepathy that exists between them, not to mention telegraphy, since they decide to send each other wires at the same time. Young Charlie often stresses their similarities, the fact that they react alike to things, think the same way, and can almost read one another's thoughts. As Young Charlie finds out more about her uncle during the film, learns in fact that he is a murderer, this telepathic quality takes on a more threatening aspect, since she is able to hide little from her uncle.

At first glance, Young Charlie seems a totally innocent person; she is horrified by what she discovers about her uncle and tries to protect her family, especially her mother, Charlie's sister, both from Charlie himself and from learning the depressing and sinister truth about him. But she progressively reveals her moral grayness to us. She decides to send for Uncle Charlie because she is bored with her small-town life, as if iUustrating Durgnat's observation that "even if evil doesn't seek out the innocent, the innocent, being dissatisfied, wiU call evil to themselves." 1 6 After Uncle Charlie arrives, she monopolizes his attention and uses their closeness to play a game of one-up-manship with her family and friends. Hitchcock even hints at a repressed incestuous facet in their relationship when Uncle Charlie gives Young Charlie an emerald betrothal ring belonging to one of his victims. Finally a climactic confrontation occurs at the top of the backsteps, the staircase that Young Charlie has been using since she found out about Uncle Charlie, who visually controls the house's front staircase. Here she threatens her uncle: "Go away or I'll kill you myself." Physically reinforcing the spiritual compromise she has made in revealing her willingness to stoop to Uncle Charlie's methods to achieve her goal, she simultaneously steps from the light into shadow. Young Charlie further compromises herself by agreeing to let Uncle Charlie leave town if he will just go away, thereby freeing him to kill more widows, the first of whom may be a family friend she sees on his train. At the end of the film, Young Charlie becomes the ironic instrument of her uncle's death, as she pushes him from the train in self-defense. The question of "how guilty is she?" also implicates us, since we have been identifying with her throughout the film.

On the other side of the coin, Uncle Charlie is one of Hitchcock's "charming villains," a strangler of rich widows, who also happens to be extremely likeable. As we are trying to be stern and not like him, we are given several reasons to excuse his behavior a childhood head injury which produced a personality change, and the implication that the widows weren't worth anything anyway. Of course, this latter observation is made by Uncle Charlie himself, and even if it's true, judgment of the widows is hardly his responsibility. But the film also implies, especially in one memorable shot where his sister, Emma (Pat Collinge), and Young Charlie loom over him as he Ues passively on his bed, that Uncle Charlie has always been dominated and smothered by women who have expected more of him than he could ever provide: the ideal brother and the Messianic uncle. So the killing of the widows may simply represent his attempts to get a bit of his own back. We really only stop liking Uncle Charlie after he begins trying to kill Young Charlie; even then it's not so easy.

Shadow of a Doubt contains some of Hitchcock's best examples of technical doubling. The film begins with two establishing sequences, introducing Uncle Charlie in the city and Young Charlie in Santa Rosa, which are practically identical:

Six shots (with all movement and direction-the bridges, the panning, the editing- consistently rightward) leading up to the first interior of Uncle Charlie's room gives us urban technology, wreckage both human . . . and material . . ., children playing in the street, the number 13 on the house door. Six shots (movement and direction consistently left) leading to the first interior of Young Charlie's room give us sunny streets with no street-games (Santa Rosa evidently has parks), an orderly town with a smiling, paternal policeman presiding over traffic and pedestrians.17

In both cases, the progression is from farthest to closest, largest to smallest, and the camera comes in through the bedroom windows to reveal Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie lying passively on their beds. The only difference is that the two beds face in opposite directions, which actually makes all the difference, since Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie thus become mirror images of each other.

This structural doubling continues throughout the film, and John Russell Taylor provides us with a summary:

. . . everything in its place in a perfectly ordered, morally ambivalent world where everything goes by twos-. . . two scenes in a church, two scenes in a garage, two visits of the police to the house, two meals, two attempted murders, and a number of identical shots of the two Charlies, Uncle and niece: Two close-ups of the back, two travelling shots from in front, two shots from below and so on.18

He neglects to mention the two scenes at the railroad station, two scenes in the kitchen, and two scenes in a bar, the second one representing the entrance of Young Charlie into Unde Charlie's world of sophistication and corruption, and the reversal or mirror image of an earlier scene in the kitchen. In the kitchen scene, Young Charlie talks about how much alike she and her uncle are, and he gives her the emerald ring; later in the bar, Unde Charlie talks about how much alike they are and demands the ring back. What has happened between is Young Charlie's discovery of her unde's true nature.

Also in the bar Young Charlie meets another, although minor, double, the waitress Louise, one of her classmates. In contrast to Young Charlie, Louise comes from a poor family and has to work to support herself, but her reaction to Uncle Charlie parallels Young Charlie's earlier admiration. She is very impressed by the emerald ring, and says ironically, "I'd just die for a ring like that." Because we identify with Young Charlie and know everything she knows, we find Louise's remarks and obvious attention to Uncle Charlie very disconcerting. This scene makes us feel that we and Young Charlie are being subjected to sinister playback of earlier moments in the film when we were all younger and more innocent.

In a parallel way to Louise and Young Charlie, the young detective, Jack Graham (Macdonald Carey) acts as a minor double for Uncle Charlie. Both seem to be competing for Young Charlie's attentions, and it appears that Young Charlie will be forced to choose between her family dictate to protect her unde, about whom she has strongly ambivalent feelings, and her duty to "society," which urges her to turn him in to the earnest detective, who strongly attracts her. The doubling is reinforced by the two scenes in the garage: in the first, Jack proposes to Young Charlie; in the second, Uncle Charlie, his rival, tries to win her for himself by asphyxiating her. Clearly Shadow of a Doubt is a largely underrated jewel of Hitchcock's themes and techniques, although it has been receiving some long overdue attention lately.

Strangers on a Train, on the other hand, is one of Hitchcock's most widely seen and discussed films because it seems to epitomize so many of his filmmaking touches. With Guy (Farley Granger), the hero, and Bruno (Robert Walker), the villain, we encounter another pair of Hitchcock doubles. There are parallels here to Shadow of a Doubt, Bruno is a very attractive figure and somewhat psychopathic. He also strangles women and is dominated by his mother. It is chiefly his energy that makes Bruno fascinating, especially in contrast to Guy, who is rather bland and apathetic. Probably some of his attractiveness results from the casting itself: Farley Granger is simply no match for Robert Walker's magnetism. But Hitchcock uses all of these points to his advantage in clouding the moral climate of the film.

In the classic opening sequence, we see a technique similar to that employed in Shadow of a Doubt. The camera tracks along with two pairs of feet en route to board a train; one set wears ostentacious shoes (Bruno's) and walks left, while the other set is conservative and dull (Guy's) and walks right. Hitchcock crosscuts between them. Once on the train, the image reverses, and Bruno's feet walk right while Guy's walk left. Finally they bump one another, seemingly by chance, and we finally see their owners' faces, peering at one another across the train aisle as the two men meet.

Guy and Bruno are more obvious doubles than were Charlie and her uncle. They are both men of about the same age, and each would like to see one of his relatives dead. Hitchcock even plays with the idea by having Bruno crack a joke about tennis as he orders them drinks: "a pair of doubles." As Ronald Christ comments, "Nowhere else in the film, or in any of the criticism of it for that matter, is Hitchcock's theme so swiftly indicated exclusively by means of what is simultaneously seen and heard on the screen." 19 Christ goes on to analyze the motifs of crisscross and doublecross upon which the film is both verbally and visually constructed, additional evidence of the doubling.

At first, Bruno and Guy appear to get on quite well together, which Rogers notes is typical of doubles:

Generally speaking doubles are on good terms with each other. . . . Subject doubles are more apt to play the friendly role of secret sharers than that of bitter antagonists at the narrative level. . . . Disharmony invariably exists between doubles at the unconscious level of the narrative.20

Such proves to be the case here; it is only after Bruno takes Guy's humoring him seriously and murders Guy's wife that the trouble between them really begins.

But what of Guy himself: True, he refuses to murder Bruno's father, but he is compromised in other ways. First, it is implied that part of his interest in Ann is due to the political contacts and career her father can provide for him when his tennis life is over; he even admits this to Hennessey, his bodyguard. Then it is certainly clear that he wants his first wife, Miriam, dead. When she refuses to go through with their divorce, he shouts over the phone to Ann that he would "like to strangle her," and Hitchcock dissolves to a close-up of Bruno's hands in the appropriate position. It is also worth remembering that when Bruno comes to Metcalf to strangle Miriam, he looks her address up in the same telephone booth where Guy makes this announcement. Perhaps it is only Guy's cowardice, his essential blandness, that keeps him from murdering her himself, rather than his innate morality. Hitchcock comments on this point to Bogdanovich: "He felt like killing her himself:"21 and even more directly to Truffaut: "For Guy, it's just as if he had committed the murder him self."22

Visual identification between the two characters is consistent throughout the film. Hitchcock constantly crosscuts between themin one shot we see Bruno checking his watch, then cut to Guy looking at his-, and Bruno has possession of Guy's lighter, which represents his relationship simultaneously to Ann, who gave it to him with their combined initials on it, and to Miriam, since Bruno uses it to get her attention so he can murder her and tries later to plant it as evidence. When Bruno comes to tell Guy of the completed murder, they are facing each other through a barred gate until Bruno says, "You're just as much in it as I am," and they hear the police car coming, when Guy steps behind the bars with Bruno.

Stranger on a Train is doubly interesting because it has a double double. The second pair are Miriam and Ann's sister, Barbara, coincidentally Pat Hitchcock, who looks like Miriam. The two girls are examples of what Rogers calls object doubles by multiplication, which means that both represent the same person to Bruno. This fact becomes apparent first when Bruno meets Barbara at the tennis club and then is threateningly emphasized during the party scene when Bruno, who is "playing at" murder with Mrs. Cunningham, almost really strangles her because he is staring at Barbara fixedly. At this moment, we see the reflected lighter flame in Barbara's glasses and hear the amusement park music which accompanied Miriam's murder. Although Barbara is never in any real danger, she realizes immediately that she is identified with Bruno's victim in some way and is terrified. We, of course, remember that she was the first to pass judgment on Miriam after her murder, announcing in Uncle Charlie fashion that Miriam deserved what she got since she was "a tramp," following this with an observation that it would be exciting to love someone so much you'd kill for them. Whether this means she suspects Guy of the murder is never clarified, but it is clear that whether he is guilty or not makes little difference to her.

There is an additional link between Miriam and Barbara: their reactions to Bruno. Strangers on a Train contains one of Hitchcock's most explicit equations of sex and violence. When Miriam and Barbara first see Bruno, each is attracted to him; Barbara even asks Ann, "Who is that attractive man?" When Bruno responds to her, each girl sees his reaction as an indication of sexual interest, but what he is really interested in is the excitement of murdering Miriam and the reliving of that excitement through Barbara. Miriam's murder on the isle of the tunnel of love at the amusement park begins like a seduction and ends in her strangling, a process that is reenacted metaphorically during the party scene when Barbara teasingly places herself where Bruno can see her while he "strangles" Mrs. Cunningham.

Strangers on a Train is studded with other pairs of characters enumerated by Durgnat: "Two little boys; two pairs of strong 'guardians'; two old ladies (Bruno's mother, his near-victim); two old men"23 (in the amusement park). Especially interesting is the parallel between Mrs. Cunningham and Bruno's mother, which links Bruno even more strongly with Uncle Charlie who murdered to revenge himself on predatory women. Also as in Shadow of a Doubt, the doubling is reinforced structurally, the two scenes at the amusement park serving as just one example.

If there are implied questions about identity in Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, they become explicit in North by Northwest. In this film, Roger Thornhill's (Cary Grant) double does not exist other than as a name, George Kaplan. The elusive Mr. Kaplan has been created by the C.I.A. to divert attention from their real agent, the appropriately named Eve (Eva Marie Saint). As the film opens, Thornhill is addressed by name by several people, and then accidentally mistaken for Kaplan and kidnapped. At first he denies he is Kaplan and attempts to assert his own identity. However, as the film continues, he becomes obsessed to find out who Kaplan is, as if only that knowledge can repair his self-image; he repeats "if I can find Kaplan, he will have the answer" several times, which may be Hitchcock's way of implying that there are no real answers for anyone. Then he tells various people that he is George Kaplan, not Roger Thornhill, and they believe him. Early in his investigation, he goes to search Kaplan's hotel room, where he is called Kaplan by both the maid and the valet. Of course, at this point, neither he nor we know that George Kaplan doesn't exist, so some interesting questions arise: 1) If a man lives in George Kaplan's hotel room, does that make him George Kaplan? 2) If other people recognize him as George Kaplan, does that make him George Kaplan? 3) What, if anything, makes him Roger Thornhill? It becomes increasingly ironic that Cary Grant finds it impossible to get people to believe he is Roger Thornhill, a real person, and to disbelieve he is George Kaplan, an imaginary person.

These questions about identity are reinforced by the way Hitchcock presents the villain of North by Northwest, Phillips Van Damm (James Mason). When Thornhill/Kaplan first meets Van Damm, he assumes he is a man named Lester Townsend, since Van Damm is living in Townsend's house and the people there call him Townsend. He is obviously basing his assumption on the same kind of information the hotel maid and valet based theirs on. Later he finds out that Van Damm is not Townsend, and the resulting confusion has been described by Gordon Gow:

Thornhill, having assumed that the character played by Mason is a United Nations delegate named Lester Townsend, and having been assumed by Mason to be Kaplan, goes into the public lounge of the United Nations Building to confront Townsend, who replies to a call to the desk to see a "Mr. Kaplan" but who turns out to be somebody that neither Thornhill nor the spectator has seen before (Philip Ober). In fact, the Mason character has "used" Townsend's house while the delegate was staying for a lengthy period in a New York apartment. Now, confused even further, Thornhill is at least able to show the real Townsend a photograph of Mason. He found it in the Kaplan hotel room, and kept it.24

At precisely this moment, when Grant is about to get some information, Townsend is killed and he is blamed for the murder. Needless to say, things get a lot worse here before they ever get any better. Eventually Phillips Van Damm is identified, but George Kaplan in the body of Roger Thornhill has to be shot full of blanks at the base of Mount Rushmore before he can finally be exorcised of his ghost.

Ultimately, where does all this get us as far as Hitchcock is concerned? First of all, Hitchcock's use of doubling is obviously linked to the technical influences he absorbed early in his career from German expressionism. But more importantly, it serves as a particularly suitable vehicle for expressing his views on the moral ambiguity in our modern world and the chaotic nature of this world itself. The result of the doubling, like the more technical uses that Hitchcock makes of lighting, oblique angles and montage, is disorienting and disconcerting to the viewer; it throws and keeps him off balance, both physically and mentally. The effect has been summarized by Albert La valley:

Hitchcock is not organizing our experience into structural systems, but rather using structures to release a kind of absurdist logic in life ... . He makes life seem dreamlike, its surface a thin crust over a substratum of fear, insecurity, unconscious anxiety, and guilt. In this dream world one character evokes another, one experience pulls together threads of many past ones.25

Were it not for doubling and elements like it, Hitchcock could be dismissed as merely a facile technician, a creator of lightweight thrillers which entertain us but have little additional value. A quick look beneath the slick surface, however, reveals him to be much more: a subtle analyst of contemporary mores and morality in their encounters with the disjointedness of modern life.