Shadow of a Doubt

This is an essay about Alfred Hitchcock. But first:

I want to talk about The Accused for a moment. The 1988 film stars Jodie Foster as a rape victim who takes legal measures against her rapists as well as the bystanders who egged them on. The film obscures the rape scene for the bulk of the film, but when they do finally show the sequence, it’s based not on Foster’s experience but on a man’s eyewitness testimony. Charitably this can be described as social commentary on the way women, and other marginalized people, are not allowed to be their own witness. More harshly, The Accused is a rape-revenge movie the same way that Philadelphia is an AIDS movie.

The Accused has been rattling around my brain because I’m trying to get letters of recommendation for my gender confirmation surgery. The entire process is a frustrating navigation within the already frustrating system of mental health care in the United States. Like Foster I apparently need a third-party to prove my veracity, to prove I want the surgery beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The infantilization of transgender people is another thing that’s been rattling around my brain. We’ve been hearing a lot about transgender youth and the parents of transgender children, so much so that observers might begin to lose sight of the fact that transgender adults exist at all. The battleground of this current transgender front of the culture war is, as it often has been, youth: transgender kids in bathrooms, transgender kids in sports, heartwarming gestures of support from parents of transgender children.

For the earliest period of transgender cinema, it was adults that took center stage, from Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda to Norman Bates and beyond. Up to that point, transgender people in the cultural imagination were largely adults, and were largely exploited as spectacle. It wasn’t until films like Ma Vie En Rose (1997), A Girl Like Me (2006), Gun Hill Road (2011), and Boy Meets Girl (2014) that cinema began to capture a growing vogue for trans youth that came into being the more that trans became a socially acceptable identity umbrella (and of course as more youth began to identify as transgender).

Even still, historical transgender portrayals going back decades have the undercurrent of childhood, specifically the idea that adult transgender identities stem from childhood. As with homosexuality, people opposed to trans identities believe that during childhood people’s genders and sexualities become warped.

This is certainly true for Norman Bates, Hitchcock’s most famous monster and one of transgender cinema’s origin stories. But it’s also true for another of Hitchcock’s films: Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock’s alleged favorite film doubles as a kind of crypto-transgender film befitting the 1940’s in which it was made.

At the center of Shadow of a Doubt is the almost supernatural bond between a young woman, Charlie Newton, and her namesake uncle Charlie Oakley. Charlie fawns over her beloved uncle during a spontaneous visit until she begins to suspect that he is in fact a serial killer called the Merry Widow murderer. While the film makes much of the twinning effect between Charlie and Charlie, less obvious is the idea that Uncle Charlie is not so much a piece of young Charlie but a glimpse of her future, specifically a male future.

The film begins when Uncle Charlie makes a spontaneous visit to his niece’s small-town family. Young Charlie is down in the dumps with a kind of existential malaise until her beloved uncle arrives. She is elated at first, but over time her uncle’s behavior begins to unnerve Charlie. Uncle Charlie gradually reveals himself as a deeply nihilistic and violent sociopath, traits that cast young Charlie’s malaise in new light as a precursor to her uncle’s own disturbances.

When Uncle Charlie gives young Charlie a ring, for example, the overt symbolism is sexual or romantic, but the mirror effect is to suggest that Uncle Charlie is perpetually drawing young Charlie into his future. Not coincidentally, Uncle Charlie is challenged for control of young Charlie’s future by a young male suitor, one of the detectives charged with determining if Uncle Charlie is in fact the Merry Widow killer.

In the end, Shadow of a Doubt comes down to a choice for young Charlie: either marry a man and enter into conventional femininity, or become a man and risk a warped, violent psyche. When Charlie descends the stairs wearing the incriminating ring (a marital symbol), she has made her choice, which is not without consequence when Uncle Charlie tries to kill her, only to die himself in the struggle. Young Charlie has successfully purged her future as a gender non-conformist.

At the funeral of Uncle Charlie, we can overhear the phrase “lost and gained a son”, both a reference to Charlie’s brief stay in Santa Rosa leading up to his death as well as the “gaining” of a son in the form of young Charlie’s suitor. But the town has also “lost” Charlie’s male persona, its secret son, as it were.

Shadow of a Doubt is about uncertainty, but it’s also about a different kind of certainty, the foreclosure of transgender existence, transgender literally meaning across gender: being at gendered odds, young Charlie and Uncle Charlie cannot coexist. As conservatives would like us to believe, young Charlie simply needs to get over this “phase”. The battle for gender is, in Shadow of a Doubt as in popular culture, waged in youth.