‘The Future’s Not Ours to See’: How Children and Young Adults Reflect the Anxiety of Lost Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s American Movies.

Introduction: In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Ambassador, while plotting to kill the Prime Minister, orders the kidnapped American child Hank McKenna killed, telling his would-be gunman, Edward Drayton: “Don’t you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Earlier in the movie, Jo McKenna entertains her son and husband by singing “Que Sera Sera,” and its playfulness becomes darkly ironic when she sings “the future’s not ours to see” on the eve of her son’s kidnapping.The movie unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game in which the McKennas desperately try to locate and save their kidnapped son, revealing a recurring Hitchcock narrative device in his American movies: He often situates children and young adults in perilous situations that render adults as powerless to provide protection. This essay examines four of Hitchcock’s American movies for how they reflect, through their use of children and young adults, a collective societal anxiety of lost innocence during the so-called era of “Victory Culture”: The United States, from the end of WWII to the early onset of Vietnam, saw itself as an emerging and subsequently established world superpower. While Hitchcock is certainly not the first and only filmmaker to use children and young adults as reflections of societal anxiety, he demonstrates a unique ability to utilize them as vessels to mirror societal anxiety about the morally-dubious future of the Western “superpower” state even as that state clings to its morally-righteous “Victory” identity. These four movies—Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Birds (1963)—reveal the heart of this anxiety as a glaring inability to protect or shield children and young adults from the horrors of the modern world—horrors that render an “un-seeable” future, which for the American is contradictory to the nation’s mythological vision of shaping and controlling the future.While an extended critical dialogue concerning Hitchcock’s treatment of children and young adults is, for the most part, non-existent, many critics point to Shadow of a Doubt (1943) as a turning point for Hitchcock the social commentator. It is his first movie to fully showcase both a child and a young adult in imminent danger. Robin Wood writes that Hitchcock overcame a “cautious” approach to filmmaking in America to hit full stride “with Shadow of a Doubt and Lifeboat (the sixth and seventh Hollywood films) [where he] begins to grapple with the realities and mythologies (material, cultural, spiritual, and ideological) of ‘America. He uses children and young adults as symbols of social anxiety for lost community and as representations of communal stability and as progenitors of human existence. And when the community can no longer protect its children, the community’s (or nation’s or world’s) very existence is jeopardized. As Hitchcock frames them, children and young adults in peril become symbolic of something much larger: Inscribed on their beings are the anxieties of a culture at large—anxieties about murder, war, terrorism, apocalypse, and so forth—and how these anxieties are meant to reflect audiences’ own proximity to the horrors of the modern world.The American period (particularly the late-WWII to late-1960s period) of Hitchcock’s filmmaking can be considered his “Modern” period. While American attitudes shifted quite radically from post-WW II victory euphoria to Cold War anxiety to Vietnam-era (and after) loss of innocence, so, too, does Hitchcock’s attitude toward his narratives’ children and young adults (and, of course, the adults who are often rendered powerless to keep them out of harm’s way). David Trotter argues that “Hitchcock’s films continued to represent human experience from the point of view of representation; while acknowledging, in a manner we might call Modernist, that the nature and scope of representation’s ‘point of view’ had become, more urgently than ever before, the issue. Not surprisingly, then, given the social climate of the United States, this is the period in which Hitchcock “gets serious,” and in which he further complicates the elements of claustrophobia seen in his British movies by drawing upon the events of his childhood to inform the work, such as his infamous jail cell experience: “[Hitchcock] ‘recalled a story about his childhood when his father sent him, aged four or five, to the police station with a note asking the sergeant to lock him into a cell for five or ten minutes. Hitchcock was indeed locked in the cell for five minutes, and that incident, along with a parental “abandonment” incident when he has very young (his parents left him alone with a maid), contributed to his fascination with suspense narratives, the conventions of which would make him famous, including: “the unexpected complication,” “the subjective camera,” “claustrophobia,” and “the mind of the murderer. Hitchcock’s childhood, as many have argued, shaped his artistic vision, including his “obsession with the detail of suffering—perhaps because of his oversensitive and protected childhood” as well as his “general British interest in crime,” most notably murder.Hitchcock’s emigration to the United States was in fact couched in his desire for more artistic “freedom” in his filmmaking, a direct result of his antagonistic relationship with the British film industry; in the late 1930s, he “began to believe that American audiences would permit him more freedom in his films.” Indisputably, Hitchcock’s films during the American period do adhere to certain genre conventions (suspense, psychological thriller, comedy, and even horror). To showcase his children and young adults in peril, Hitchcock often works with genre conventions more commonly associated with the psychological thriller and horror genres, in that he utilizes a threatening, monstrous presence which often serves as the major focus of the narrative. Beyond that, both the source of the monstrous threat and the nature and character of those who combat it and are pursued by it are foregrounded to varying degrees, often leading to a plot sequencing that relies on the stages of “order, disorder, order.” Finally, many of his movies (including the four films under investigation in this essay) reflect his (and society’s) changing attitudes about Americans’ ability to shield their children and young adults from the potential harm of the monstrous presence, including a long-standing American film tradition that children must survive. But certainly viewers will remember Hitchcock’s British film Sabotage (1936), with its terrorist plot leading to the inadvertent death of the child Stevie. Stevie, while unknowingly delivering a bomb for a terrorist, becomes distracted long enough (while petting a puppy, no less) to be killed when it detonates. Hitchcock was not afraid to place the child in harm’s way in Sabotage, foreshadowing a thematic trend he would continue in his American filmmaking

Pynchon\u27s Age of Reason: Mason & Dixon and America\u27s Rise of Rational Discourse

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal time in America when, in theory, rational discourse converted people into better citizens. However, as Mason and Dixon create their Line, recognizing that it will, in effect, divide North from South, they begin to realize that America consumes them with irrational discourse

The Immediacy of Narrated Combat: Operation Iraqi Freedom as Public Spectacle

From the Vietnam War to Operation Desert Storm to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have seen a dramatic shift in the ways they see combat - countless, and often dubious, images certainly impact how they interpret their warriors\u27 actions. Iraqi Freedom presents an interesting shift in the immediate availability of numerous fiction and non-fiction narratives often stemming from the accounts of the soldiers themselves. I refer to this shift as the immediacy of narrated combat. Iraqi Freedom, unlike Vietnam and Desert Storm, has seen an almost immediate response in terms of the narratives we see and read, including movies, television programs, CD-ROM compilations, video games, numerous videos brought back with, and blogs posted by, our men and women serving in, and subsequently returning from, Iraq, and literary non-fiction accounts of combat. Much as the Bush I Administration used a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative to spin a decisive Gulf War victory into a restoration of national zest for armed combat, the Bush Il Administration, despite its efforts to create, deliver, and maintain a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative, has seen this narrative beset by counter-narratives that have eroded its credibility and ultimately revealed more rational and sober accounts of Iraqi Freedom

The Novel-to-Film Translatability of Satire in the The Day of the Locust and Wise Blood

It comes as no surprise that the critical work focusing on Nathanael West\u27s The Day of the Locust (1933) and Flannery O\u27 Connor\u27s Wise Blood (1952) sheds much light on the motifs satirical and otherwise at work in the novels. However, the film versions of the novels, those by legendary directors John Schlesinger (1969\u27s Midnight Cowboy) and John Huston (1941\u27s The Maltese Falcon), respectively, remain open to investigating how satire works within them. On the one hand, for instance, the popular vein of criticism regarding West and his Hollywood novel seems focused by the Frankfurt school of thought-mostly Adorno, and to a lesser extent, Benjamin (Roberts; Simon; Strychacx). On the other hand, the criticism regarding O\u27Connor tends to focus on the ambiguities of the novel-some critics, for example, read O\u27Connor\u27s Wise Blood theme as the necessity of acknowledging one\u27s spiritual heritage (Cook, 199)

I thought perhaps the reaper was going to do something to you : The Serpent\u27s Kiss and the Issue of Reverse-Objectification

In this discussion, I examine the continual problem of female representation in the movie narrative. Movie narratives often rely on female characters situated in roles that find them objectified by males, allowing us to hypothesize--as the body of feminist film criticism has done since at least the mid- I970s--that she also becomes objectified by her viewing audience. Then calling for a sweeping change in the mindsets of both male and female filmmakers, Sharon Smith precisely points out the problems of female representation: The role of the woman in a film almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating games she plays with the male characters. On the other hand a man is not shown purely in relation to the female characters, but in a wide variety of roles-struggling against nature ... , or against militarism ... ,or proving his manhood on the range. Women provide trouble or sexual interludes for the male characters, or are not present at all I will use Smith\u27s observation as a springboard into a brief examination of female representation in The Piano.Using this movie as a guide, I will then demonstrate how The Serpent\u27s Kiss, much as The Piano does, provides us with a model of female empowerment--a model that subverts the patriarchal order of the movie narrative

Children in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Jason McEntee is a contributing author, \u27The Future’s Not Ours to See’: How Children and Young Adults Reflect the Anxiety of Lost Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s American Movies.”, pp.31-46. Children and youth perform both innocence and knowingness within Hitchcock\u27s complex cinematic texts. Though the child often plays a small part, their significance - symbolically, theoretically, and philosophically - offers a unique opportunity to illuminate and interrogate the child presence within the cinematic complexity of Hitchcock\u27s films.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/english_book/1009/thumbnail.jp

F901318 represents a novel class of antifungal drug that inhibits dihydroorotate dehydrogenase

There is an important medical need for new antifungal agents with novel mechanisms of action to treat the increasing number of patients with life-threatening systemic fungal disease and to overcome the growing problem of resistance to current therapies. F901318, the leading representative of a novel class of drug, the orotomides, is an antifungal drug in clinical development that demonstrates excellent potency against a broad range of dimorphic and filamentous fungi. In vitro susceptibility testing of F901318 against more than 100 strains from the four main pathogenic Aspergillus spp. revealed minimal inhibitory concentrations of ≤0.06 µg/mL—greater potency than the leading antifungal classes. An investigation into the mechanism of action of F901318 found that it acts via inhibition of the pyrimidine biosynthesis enzyme dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH) in a fungal-specific manner. Homology modeling of Aspergillus fumigatus DHODH has identified a predicted binding mode of the inhibitor and important interacting amino acid residues. In a murine pulmonary model of aspergillosis, F901318 displays in vivo efficacy against a strain of A. fumigatus sensitive to the azole class of antifungals and a strain displaying an azole-resistant phenotype. F901318 is currently in late Phase 1 clinical trials, offering hope that the antifungal armamentarium can be expanded to include a class of agent with a mechanism of action distinct from currently marketed antifungals

The Rhetoric of Oliver Stone\u27s JFK

Upon its release, Oliver Stone\u27s controversial film JFK elicited cries from citizens who insisted that our government make public confidential Warren Commission files pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That the government ultimately made public some (but not all) of the files following the film\u27s popular success reflects the power films (and filmmakers) possess. With his film, Stone challenges the government by providing an alternative theory to that reached by the Warren Commission. Although many individuals and groups have challenged the Warren Commission Report since its release, the mass public, for the most part, had not responded to the Report with a collective fervor until Stone presented his film. Stone\u27s film raises several rhetorical problems. First, in our era of mass culture, people are more likely to consult quick and often unreliable means of conveying information, such as popular film and television, than to consult more reliable means, such as academic, published texts. Not only does Stone consult texts by popular historians (Jim Garrison and Jim Marrs) and historical records, but he also posits his interpretation of events concerning JFK\u27s assassination. Historians, both popular and academic, do this as well, of course, but Stone intentionally blends fact with fabrication, creating myriad images whose historical accuracy remain difficult for viewers to determine. Second, because film constitutes a popular medium, many viewers, particularly young viewers, will turn to JFK for a quick history lesson and not actually read publications written by historians. Ultimately, a film like JFK can yield both negative results (many will interpret Stone\u27s film as verifiable history) and positive results (the film might generate interest in a historical topic). In this thesis, I explore these rhetorical problems by consulting three bodies of research: 1) contemporary film criticism; 2) classical rhetoric; and 3) cultural criticism. By beginning with contemporary film criticism, I address the issues involved with creating a film that addresses a historical topic as well as how contemporary audiences might analyze and assess a film like JFK. Next, by consulting classical rhetoric, primarily the works of Plato and Aristotle, I address questions regarding the knowability of truth. Then, by consulting the work of cultural critics (Theodor Adorno, for example) who address issues such as the role technology plays in disseminating information to a mass culture, I assess the implications of recreating history on film--especially for a culture deeply immersed in (and perhaps easily persuaded or manipulated by) the technology of celluloid images. Their work, in a sense, updates classical rhetoric by considering the many roles technology plays in conveying information. Finally, in order to illustrate further both the strengths and weaknesses of JFK\u27s persuasive power, I discuss how I use the film in my composition classroom as a lesson in argument

Iconic Sports Venues: Persuasion in Public Spaces

Jason McEntee is a contributing author, The Last Palace Standing: Mitchell\u27s Corn Palace and the Rise of an Iconic Sports Venue. , pp.41-65. From the Colosseum of Rome to Wrigley Field and Madison Square Garden, iconic sports venues are larger than life. They often exist in a seemingly sacred space, outside the hustle and bustle of the everyday. At their most basic level, iconic sports venues are revered and idolized. They emanate a sense of persuasion that contributes to how they become meaningful for those who come into contact with them. This book examines how and why iconic sports venues acquire meaning. Looking at different venues, chapters address how the material features of a site participate in the construction of messages and meanings, and how they influence those messages and meanings. Each chapter includes a description of the venue in question; an interpretation of its mystique; and a discussion of the implications of the interpretation. A unique and timely contribution to the fields of composition, persuasion, sport management, sport rhetoric, and communication, the goal of this book is to inspire more scholarly research, essays, and projects focused on the persuasive qualities of sports venues. More broadly, scholars, students, and professionals can use the chapters in this book as models for investigating iconic structures both locally and globally.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/english_book/1012/thumbnail.jp