An exciting announcement:Derek Dubois has had a formal proposal accepted to present at a prestigious conference at Texas Christian University this fall. His paper: Fatal Femme - Bruno Antony and Hitchcock's Subversion of the Femme Fatale Archetype, will be part of the Analyzing the 1950s: Media, Politics, Culture Conference to be held in Forth Worth Texas on November 15, 2014.
Accepted proposal:
Director Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as an expert
craftsman and the epitome of the Classical Hollywood paradigm yet, rather
contradictorily, he regularly subverted socially normative behavior in the characters
of his masterful suspense films. While not often viewed as a director
working within the film noir genre, I wish to contend that 1951's Strangers on a Train is one of the most
wholly unique entries in the noir cycle.
In this film, Hitchcock subtextually violates 1950s values utilizing
popularized aspects of Freudian psychology to craft a masterpiece of visual
style in a narrative filled to the brim with violence, death, and
sexuality. In adapting Patricia
Highsmith's novel, the famed director encodes the villainous antagonist Bruno
Anthony within a femme fatale archetype thus synthesizing a homoerotic bond
between the film's two male characters and escalating tension and unease within
the film.
