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Last week, in my “Films of Alfred Hitchcock” class, we saw “Notorious”, which is a film about Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, who is recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate a group of Germans who have relocated to Brazil after World War II. In the midst of their mission, Alicia and Devlin fall in love, but Devlin puts up a stoic front in the beginning, choosing duty over love.

Alicia concludes that he was merely pretending to love her as part of his job. Her assignment in Rio de Janeiro involves resuming an acquaintance with a wealthy German businessman, Alexander Sebastian, who against the wishes of his mother asks Alicia to marry him. She accepts the proposal but disappointed that Devlin raises no objections. Her objective then lies in infiltrating Sebastian’s circle of German scientists. Following their marriage, Alicia explores the Sebastian mansion, but finds the wine cellar is locked. Devlin invites himself to a welcoming party held at Sebastian’s mansion to uncover the secret of the wine bottles. At the party, Devlin and Alicia investigate the wine cellar, where the find some bottles of uranium. When Sebasian finds them together in the wine cellar, they convince him that they are having a tryst. Noticing that the key was missing and then returned, Sebastian suspects Alicia of being a U.S. spy and his mother plots to eliminate her. Alicia is then poisoned and on bed rest until Devlin finally comes to her rescue, leaving Alexander to the Nazi officials.

In the film review by Tania Modelski entitled, “The Woman Who Was Known Too Much”, she argues that in Notorious, Hitchcock reversed his usual notion for the “female Gothic”, in which he typically represent the women’s investigation of their victimization by the men they love. She argues that “Devlin steadfastidly maintains his air of command” allowing Alicia to be placed in dangerous and compromising situations. The “trajectory involves an oedipal progression, fixed at a preoedipal moment – the moment analyzed by Freud in the child’s fort/da game”.

I thought the concept of the fort/da was one of particular interest, especially in its theory of the masochism, and its correlation to Devlin and Alicia’s relationship, as noted by Leo Bersani:

“The child enjoys the fantasy of the mother suffering the pain of separation which she originally inflicted on him. And to say this is to be reminded that revenge here must include the avenger’s own suffering; by making his mother disappear, the child has just as effectively deprived himself of her presence as he has deprived her of his. But the child’s suffering is now inseparable from two sources of pleasure: his representation of his mother’s suffering, and what I take to be the narcissistic gratification of exercising so much power. In reality, there is no sequence here; rather, there is a single, satisfying representation of a separation painful to both the mother and the child. In other words, mastery is simultaneous with self-punishment; a fantasy of omnipotence and autonomy (the child both controls the mother’s movements and doesn’t need her) is inseparable from a repetition of pain.”

Modleski: “Thus both hero and male spectator derive a great deal of narcissistic gratification from exercising – directly or vicariously – power over the female subject.”

Modleski: “My analysis of Notorious may stand, then, as a kind of prolegomenon to a politicized deconstruction of the binary oppositions informing feminist film theory: those oppositions clustered around the constellations male/subject/knower/sadist, woman/object/known/masochist. On the one hand, women at the movies are already engaged in an ctive, knowing, and rebellious activity of spectatorship; and on the one hand, as Hitchcock never ceases to fear, men are constantly in danger of having their power undermined – of being deprived of the keys to their secrets by women who, tough notorious, can never be completely subdues or fully known.”