Frenzy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera does something close to unforgivable. It has climbed the stairs of Bob Rusk's Covent Garden building behind him and behind Babs Milligan, and at the door of his flat — where we already know exactly what waits — it stops. Then it backs away. Down the stairs, tread by tread, out through the street entrance and into the ordinary din of the market: barrows, lorries, men crying prices over crates of fruit. The murder happens behind us. The world does not pause to notice.

Critics call that shot tact, or mercy. It is neither, and saying why is the quickest way into what Deleuze saw in Hitchcock. For Deleuze, Hitchcock is the filmmaker who completed one whole regime of cinema — the movement-image, where a person perceives a danger and acts to change it — by quietly adding a term it never had. Most thrillers run on a circuit: see threat, do something. Hitchcock introduced a third party who isn't on screen. He called it suspense; Deleuze calls it the relation-image, the mental-image. The meaning of a scene stops living inside the characters' actions and starts living in a relation that we hold and they don't. Frenzy is built almost entirely out of that gap. We are told who the Necktie Murderer is within the first half-hour. Everything after — Blaney hunted, arrested, the patient Inspector Oxford reconstructing the wrong story over his wife's inedible dinners — is shadowed by knowledge that belongs to the audience alone. Nothing is withheld for surprise. It is withheld from the people inside the film so that the relation can do its work on the people outside it.

Watch how an object becomes a piece of this knowing. A necktie, in this film, stops being a necktie. It is what Deleuze calls a mark — an object meaningful through a habitual chain, when you see this, expect that — and the whole city has learned to read it the way we have. Then there is the monogrammed tie pin, prised from the broken fingers of a corpse in a sack of potatoes. That is a fetish in the precise sense: a part-object soaked in compulsive force, the relic the drive cannot leave behind. The pin is what undoes Rusk, and the long, awful, half-comic sequence of his contorting among the sacks to retrieve it is the drive made physical — appetite reaching back into the thing it consumed.

Which is where Frenzy parts from the rest of Hitchcock. He was a director of Thirdness, of relations and reasoning and the cool architecture of irony. Here he lets the floor drop out into something he usually kept at arm's length: the impulse-image, and behind it Émile Zola's naturalism. Covent Garden, photographed by Gilbert Taylor in available light with the grain of documentary, looks at first like a setting — London's wholesale market, all social texture, sticky pub tables, the anthropology of a working day. Deleuze would call that the derived-milieu: the concrete surface. But the film keeps showing us the surface as a skin over an originary world of pure appetite. The market exists to move food. Men eat, paw fruit, swallow, dispose. Rusk, gregarious and well-liked, moves through it as predatory normalcy — the warmth everyone trusts — and his killing reads as a symptom of the same downward drive that fills the barrows. The horror isn't that violence invades the ordinary world. It's that the ordinary world, looked at long enough, is already running on hunger.

Now the retreating camera makes sense. Pulling back into the indifferent street is not the film sparing us; it is the film opening the closed room onto the Open — the larger whole that keeps changing whether or not we witness the worst of it. The street carries on. That is the cruelty and the truth of it: private atrocity is invisible inside public life, and the cut to noise outside implicates us by leaving us alone with what we know.

None of this is invented from nothing. Lang's M gave Hitchcock the engine forty years earlier — let the audience know the killer's face before the law does, then cross-cut his freedom against an innocent's pursuit — and Frenzy runs that architecture more openly and longer than Psycho dared. The Lodger, his own 1927 London serial-killer template, supplies the wrong-man hunted through a city where the real killer circulates freely; post-Code, he can finally show what the silent film could only imply. Powell's Peeping Tom taught the seamless social surface over a compulsion, and the camera that makes us complicit. Polanski's Repulsion proved sexual violence could be held in a static, unflinching medium shot inside British social realism — the exact form of Brenda's death. And The Trouble with Harry had already rehearsed the horror-farce of an uncooperative corpse, which the potato truck pays off.

What Frenzy did to film is small and permanent. It showed that Hitchcock's great invention — suspense as a relation the spectator carries — loses none of its power when you strip away the glamour and let the drives show through the floor. Watch it again for the backward camera on the stairs. It is the moment a master of knowing admits how little knowing saves anyone.