Before
it can be argued that Bruno Antony serves as Hitchcock’s version of a femme-fatale
it is important to place Strangers on a
Train within the ambiguous genre of film noir. Unlike the western or the musical, critics
and theorists have long been at odds about what exactly comprises film
noir. Gaylyn Studlar has argued that
film noir
is
an archetypal demonstration of all those traits that came to the foreground in
post-World War II Hollywood crime melodramas: highly stylized low-key lighting,
circular or convoluted narrative, and an atmosphere of corruption in which
violence, paranoia, and obsessive desire hold sway...[all in all] a more
morally ambiguous, structurally complex and sexually bold American crime film”
(Studlar 381).
Chiaroscuro lighting,
having emerged during the silent era through German Expressionism and segueing
into Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s, evolved into the low-key lighting
patterns of the film noir genre. This
visual style, aided by a mise-en-scene of dark claustrophobia, aimed to
manifest the nihilistic attitudes of the genre’s morally-torn protagonist. This film noir protagonist, an active male
agent, is commonly matched with a femme fatale who utilizes cunning sexuality
to further her own gains. Thus, the
success of the male protagonist often depends upon his ability to withstand the
siren song of the femme fatale. Strangers on a Train exemplifies many of
the traits found in the film noir cycle.
In addition, the screenplay is credited to Raymond Chandler, an
enormously successfully writer of hard-boiled fiction, who also wrote the
screenplay for 1944’s landmark film noir Double
Indemnity. These hallmarks: a
distinct visual style, an active male protagonist, and the femme-fatale all
signal the genre of film noir.
As
the first criterion of film noir is found in its visual patterns it behooves us
to begin an analysis of Strangers on a
Train’s mise-en-scene, especially lighting patterns. Hitchcock, though not often credited as a
film-noir director, utilizes many of the same visual cues that factor into the film
noir genre. Venetian blind shadows sweep
across Bruno’s face (a motif straight out of Double Indemnity) as he details his plans for murder early in the
film. Additional patterns of low-key
lighting invade many of the film’s most memorable sequences including the
fairground and tunnel of love where Bruno murders Guy’s wife; outside of Guy’s
home when Bruno confesses the crime from behind the symbolic shadows of a
wrought-iron fence; within Bruno’s own home the night Guy visits to warn
Bruno’s father of his son’s intentions. Hitchcock’s
mastery of the mise-en-scene reflects the visual patterns so often ascribed to film
noir. Next, the narrative, concerning
such low-brow themes as murder plots also fit this pattern. Film noir staples from this period such as Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice concern a femme fatale luring a male
protagonist to commit murder in exchange for her wild sexuality. This narrative device circumscribes the genre
with a penchant for exploring vulnerable American masculinity in the context of
a new post-war culture and positions the femme fatale as the missing link in
attributing Strangers on a Train to
the film noir cannon.
It
is in regards to this element, the femme fatale, that proves to be so carefully
designed as to elude the casual viewer. As
indicated by Benshoff and Griffen, film noir’s femme fatales were “women who
lured men into their sphere of influence and would just as easily murder a man
as marry him…[the femme fatale] pursued her own desires (sexual and otherwise)
instead of passively supporting the male lead” (223). Having
already established two of the three criteria for situating Strangers on a Train as film noir (dark,
expressionistic visual motifs and a melodramatic crime narrative centered around
wounded American masculinity), I wish to argue that the character of Bruno
Antony is Hitchcock’s transgressive version of a femme-fatale, a character
obviously typically female, who utilizes sexuality at the expense of the male
protagonist for personal gain and pleasure.
The
narrative arc of Hitchcock’s Strangers on
a Train largely follows that of Highsmith’s novel although several
deviations from the source material curiously alter the reading of Bruno’s
character. In the novel Bruno is
actually named Charles Anthony Bruno and during the initial meeting on the
train the novel offers additional clues to Bruno’s sexual orientation. Throughout this scene, in both the novel and
film versions, Bruno liberally asserts himself into Guy’s life with great
familiarity. He invites Guy to come back
to his room to dine. Here, in the
privacy of Bruno’s cabin, is where he spills the details on his murderous
plan. His body language is relaxed and
inviting, his feet up, lounging like a pin-up model. But In Highsmith’s novel Bruno goes so far as
to also suggest that he and Guy vacation together in Santa Fe (Highsmith 48). I believe that Hitchcock builds from
Highsmith’s characterization and further encodes Bruno as a homosexual character
through a working knowledge of Freudian psychosexual theory which equates his
villainous madness to aberrant sexual behaviors.
It
is no secret that Hitchcock was familiar with Freudian theory as his films are
rife with characters affected with misplaced psychic energy. Examples include the transgendered (Psycho), voyeurism (Rear Window), trauma (Marnie),
manic depression (The Wrong Man), and
masquerading (Vertigo). In addition, Hitchcock had indeed already worked
with themes of homosexuality in the 1948 film Rope (with Farley Granger who plays Guy Haines in Strangers) based loosely upon the
real-life Leopold and Loeb murder case.
It is important to establish a link between the cinema of Hitchcock and
the psychoanalytic work of Freud which established homosexuality as an abnormal
mental disorder. Freud noted, “In all
our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment
to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of
childhood” (Freud 462). He continues to argue
that homosexuality is in essence a consequence initiated by misplaced psychic
energy rooted in a failed mastery of the Oedipal complex.
This
failure in psychosexual development certainly ties back into the plot of Strangers on a Train in which Bruno, a
character with a very close attachment to his mother, is cunningly plotting to
have his own father executed. The
narrative is essentially a reworking of the Oedipal journey, that Freud states
all men must conquer, externalized in Bruno’s desires. Bruno Antony, though an adult male, still
lives at home, shirks work, and has a vicious hatred of his father. The first scene in Bruno’s home begins with
the image of Bruno’s mother filing his nails for him. Regardless, the quest for moments in the film
that “prove” Bruno to be a homosexual character should be subordinate to the
primary intentions of the film’s auteur.
In an archival audio interview with filmmaker and historian Peter
Bogdanovich, Hitchcock was asked if Bruno was homosexual. Hitchcock’s reply: “I would think so”
(Hitchcock). Homosexuality, like any
variety of threat to American mores in the 1950s classifies Bruno as The Other
based upon the abnormality of his psychosexual development.
Hitchcock
utilizes homosexuality as one aspect of classifying Bruno Antony as The Other
for the purposes of creating a stronger villain. Here it also becomes fruitful to revisit one
of the changes Hitchcock made to Highsmith’s source material: Bruno Antony as a
reconstruction of the name Charles Anthony Bruno. In addition to relegating Bruno’s sexual
orientation as an Other, Hitchcock has constructed a villain whose very name
signals an exotic foreignness. Bruno Antony symbolizes a very-real
threat to the normative values of 1950s America by offering the possibility of
pleasurable alternative lifestyles that clashed with those dictated by
ideological institutions. Theorist Robert J. Corber has remarked
that Hitchcock’s film
represents
the achievement of a fixed heterosexual identity as virtually impossible…this
paranoia is directly related to Cold War fears that ‘the homosexual’ was
indistinguishable from ‘the heterosexual’ and had infiltrated all levels of
American Society (Corber 61).
If a film’s protagonist is
the spectator’s surrogate for identification then the threat Bruno represents
to Guy is a threat represented to the viewer as well. Suspense in Strangers on a Train is derived by placing the spectator in Guy’s
shoes in a battle with Bruno Antony rife with homoeroticism. It’s no surprise that, as brilliantly played
by Robert Walker, Bruno is an alarmingly attractive and sensational figure who
tends to sweep the viewer off their feet with grace and humor. When Bruno drops the incriminating cigarette
lighter down the storm drain towards the end of the picture the audience is
left with bated breath in hopes that he’ll be able to retrieve it in time. By the end of the picture Guy, as well as the
spectator, have somewhat been seduced by the allure of Bruno’s Otherness. It goes without saying, of course, that
Freud’s theories on homosexuality are completely un-testable and homosexuality
has thankfully been removed from the Diagnostic
Statistical Manual as a mental illness but Hitchcock’s use of Freud instills
his psychotic villain with the “aberrance” of his sexual orientation.
Acknowledging
Bruno Antony as a homosexual character does not in-and-of-itself equate him to
a femme fatale, yet. If femme fatales are
characters who uses a venomous sexuality to further their own gains it becomes
essential to investigate whether or not Guy Haines reciprocates these feelings
for Bruno as well as whether Bruno’s attempts to have his father murdered are
initiated less through the surface level plan of swapping murders but rather
through quid-pro-quo exchange of sex. Robert
Corber has written that as the initial meeting scene on the train progresses,
“Guy becomes increasingly uncomfortable with Bruno’s flirtatious behavior. When Bruno suggests that they spend a couple
of days together in Santa Fe, Guy snaps: ‘Pick up somebody else’ (Corber
70). Corber also notes that during their
first meeting Guy leaves behind a copy of Plato indicating that the choice of
reading material may work as “Highsmith’s not so subtle clue that [Guy] is
latently homosexual” (70). There is an
antagonism between Guy and Bruno that is often read as Guy’s reluctance to
acknowledge his own homosexual feelings in response to Bruno. Regardless, Guy and Bruno are certainly two
halves of a greater whole: the ego and the id, darkness and light, good and
evil. Guy is a model citizen and Bruno
is his evil doppelganger, a man who encompasses the darkness that society and
civility do not permit successful adult men to acknowledge. On the outside however both men look
strikingly similar: youthful and attractive white American males, clean-cut in
suits, especially when inhabited by Granger and Walker.
The
realization that Strangers on a Train
is a film about an everyman American male overcoming the seduction of a
malicious homosexual threat creates the basis of an argument for Bruno
inhabiting the role of femme fatale. But
what is to be gained by relegating Bruno to such a position? I’d argue that Hitchcock’s subversion offers
us a unique reworking of the masquerade: Bruno is a homosexual character whose sexuality,
manifest through attempted seduction, permits a degree of femininity which in
turn permits a masquerade, typical for the femme fatale, in obtaining the role
of the phallus. In the introduction to Screen’s compendium on feminist film theory the author indicates that the
role of the femme fatale “was almost always positioned as phallic in so far as
she sought to take the place of the male, to become the phallus herself”
(Screen 8). Exploring the function of
this play on established roles in film noir creates interesting new
implications on traditional models of spectatorship.
To
call Bruno, a male character, a femme fatal may seem like a far-fetched notion
until the argument is viewed through the lens of the masquerade. The masquerade as established by Mary Ann
Doane “holds it at a distance.
Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. [Its] resistance to patriarchal positioning
would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness,
as presence-to-itself, as, precisely, imagistic” (Doane 235). Of course Strangers
on a Train doesn’t overtly present us with an imagistic femininity but I’d
argue that reading Guy as entangled in a homoerotic relationship with Bruno
substitutes for this mask of womanliness on the character of Bruno Antony. Doane continues to argue that this form of
masquerade is not simply for females in the audience but for female characters
on screen. She adds that, “this type of
masquerade, an excess of femininity, is aligned with the femme fatale..[and is]
necessarily regarded by men as evil incarnate” (235). Throughout the film, Bruno attempts to woo Guy
into his diabolical plan much in the same way a lover may try to woo a
partner. This relationship goes so far
as to include a scene where Bruno offers Guy the key to his home. In addition to events on the narrative level
that support this reading, every time we leave Guy’s point-of-view and switch
to Bruno’s, we are adopting this position and rooting for his success. It is humorous when Bruno pops the young boy’s
balloon at the fair. It is nerve-wracking
when Bruno drops the cigarette lighter down the storm drain. This ability of Bruno to at once inspire simultaneous
fear and awe is both a credit to Walker’s performance and the film’s careful
construction of a masquerading villain.
If
Hitchcock plays with classical Hollywood cinema to construct charming male characters
with fluid, amorphous boundaries of sexuality generally considered abnormal and
even deviant by the ideology of the period then was he actively working to
destabilize how a spectator can receive pleasure through processes of
identification? Steve Neale’s pioneering
work in positioning masculinity as spectacle raises some interesting points,
even if the films he examines put the male body on display for the spectator’s
gaze much more readily than Hitchcock is prepared to do in Strangers on a Train. Neale indicates
that when film presents us with the male body it is typically “heavily mediated
by the looks of the characters involved.
And those looks are marked not by desire, but rather by fear, or hatred,
or aggression…[they seem to] minimize and displace the eroticism they each tend
to involve, to disavow any explicitly erotic look at the male body” (Neale
18). Nevertheless, unlike Neale’s filmic
examples, the patterns of looks from Guy onto Bruno do not justify a
minimization and displacement of eroticism.
Occasionally, the camera does in fact position Walker’s Bruno in pieces
for consumption whether it’s his lounging body in the train car at the
beginning of the film, Bruno relaxing in his silk robe at home, or the
consistent motif of his hands in close-up that symbolize both aggression and
power.
The
effect of this subversion at the level of representation is intriguing as the
repercussions seem unique to this particular film rather than a cinematic
movement as a whole. There is a
dangerous quality to Hitchcock’s cavalier attitudes which seem poised to
destroy the notions of gender norms and patriarchal ideology at any
moment. As Judith Butler has noted, “the
loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender
configuration, destabilizing substantive identity and depriving the
naturalizing narrative of compulsory heterosexuality of the central
protagonists: “Man” and “Woman” (Butler 146).
In turn I would add that it truly doesn’t matter whether Guy Haines
reciprocates homosexual feelings for Bruno or whether one can read the two as
involved in any level of gay relationship.
Since Guy Haines successfully clears his name and brings about the
demise of Bruno Antony, normative American masculinity has won. Not only is the threat that Bruno represents
quelled but so too are the possibilities of alternative representation
Hitchcock was hinting at. As the
narrative of film noir often boils down to whether or not the male protagonist
can withstand the advances of the femme fatale, so too Strangers on a Train posits the same dilemma. This may be why the film is often overlooked
as a powerful film noir in its own right.
It doesn’t seem to languish in the nihilism or despair attributed to more
traditional films of the genre.
Concluding
the argument for Bruno Antony as Hitchcock’s homosexual femme fatale yields
interesting avenues in representation and spectatorial relationships. It is still important to consider the
fundamental differences between Highsmith’s original novel and Hitchcock’s filmic
adaptation. Ultimately one of the
greatest moments of split between the two is that, in Highsmith’s novel, Guy
Haines kills Bruno’s father. The
disconnect between layers of homoerotic undercurrents within Highsmith’s novel
and a filmic adaptation were explored by theorist Chris Straayer in regards to
another of Highsmith’s works, The
Talented Mr. Ripley, where it is noted that
these
divergent endings are the result of contradictory attitudes toward
identity..two texts in relation to masculinity, homosexuality, and… in these
realms the novel, unlike the film, endorses a freedom from determination and
fixity that is compatible with both existentialism of the 1950s and
contemporary pos-tstructuralism (Straayer 115).
This notion of what was
acceptable surely has more to do with requirements of censorship and strict
codes of behavior governing classical Hollywood cinema that film as a dominant
medium of popular culture has been restricted to. Further evidence of this is provided by the
fact that the American version of Strangers
on a Train has been cut to de-emphasize any overtly homoerotic flirtation
between Guy and Bruno as compared to the British release. Or, it may be by design that Hitchcock simply
wanted Guy Haines to be less-vulnerable to the advances of a homosexual
femme-fatale and more of a heroic bastion of American masculinity fighting off
the Cold War advances of an enemy among
us.
Works Cited
Benshoff, Harry M. and
Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing
Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality
at the Movies. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Corber, Robert J. In the Name of National Security:
Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political
Construction
of Gender in Postwar America. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade.” The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in
Sexuality. New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Freud, Sigmund. “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His
Childhood.” The Freud Reader. Ed.
Peter
Gay. New York: Norton, 1995.
Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train. New York: Norton, 2001.
Hitchcock, Aflred. Interview.
Peter Bogdanovich. 1963.
Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle.” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinites
in
Hollywood
Cinema. Ed. Steven Cohan & Ine Rae Hark. Routledge: New York, 1993.
Screen. The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in
Sexuality. New York: Routledge,
1996.
Straayer, Chris. “The Talented Poststructuralist:
Heteromasculinity, Gay Artifice, and Class
Passing.” Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. Ed. Peter Lehman. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Studlar, Gaylyn. “Double Indemnity: Hard-Boiled Film
Nor.” Film Analysis: A Norton Reader.
Ed.
Jeffrey Geiger & R.L. Rutsky. New
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