Blackmail

I would love to highlight the narrative significance of the set design of Mr. White’s store in illustrating the concept of “blackmail” with its architectural elements, including thresholds, visibility (or vision), acoustics, and circulation. In the store scene, we can see four thresholds that the three main characters (Alice, Frank and Tracy) move through (or try to), and each of the thresholds marks the clear spatial, symbolistic, and narrative boundary.

The one to start with is the main entrance of the store front, which marks the boundary between the urban public space, and the “semi-private” family-owned store. At 52:19, we see that Tracy is the only character outside of the store, who has been following Frank (implied by film) and now lurking through the glass on the door. Soon enough, as he walks through that door, he is no longer a stranger in the city who only had shown his shadow. He now becomes another main character on the stage, entangled in the more “private” matter between Frank and Alice. This very threshold later showed its symbolism on separating the public and the semi-private: whenever a random stranger enters the store from the street, the three characters are interrupted and have to pretend to be normal. The moment when the intrusion of the public happens after every doorbell ring, we can also hear the sounds from the real world outside come in, breaking the silent tension in the room.

The second threshold is not a conventional door, but rather an enclosure — a transparent, but sound-proof phone booth. In sequential order, Alice first enters it alone and comes out; later Frank enters and calls upon Alice to join him; Tracy comes to open the booth door; Frank receives a call in the booth (01:07:10). All of these moments of being inside and outside of the booth created the suspense and uncertainty not only between the three characters in the narrative, but also between the film and us. And this particular threshold brings in the themes of vision and visibility into the scene. The glass box in the first two scenarios suggests an attempt for creating a most private and intimate space for knowledge exchange in the store. Once the door is closed, we can no longer hear any sound from outside, giving the illusion of being safe and isolated. But as Tracy opens the door and intrudes, we see that the efforts are in vain. Tracy later even made an explicit comment on the visibility of the glass box: “Don't wave the important clues inside of phone boxes: they've got glass doors.” Noticeably, the only time a character actually receives a call is when the other two main characters are stuck in the inner room. At 01:07:10, he audience follows Frank to the phone booth to listen (or eavesdropping) to his knowledge exchange with his colleague. Hitchcock has been playing with the tension between visibility and sound. Following the camera position, the audience is standing outside of the booth. What is different from Frank and Alice’s isolated conversation before is that: with the open door, we can now hear Frank’s voice, but we still cannot hear the other side of the telephone. Instead, we could only guess from Frank’s reaction.

The third door marks the connection between the store and the most private part of the space. As Tracy invites himself to stay for the breakfast in the family’s dining room, he is now introduced as a “friend” of Frank. This layer of fake identity makes the triangular relationship more fragile than before. At the most intimate space in the set, this is where we really get to see the three characters’ inner thought process, and also for the first time Tracy’s background story. Later as Frank orders Alice to lock this third door, and thus firmly cutting the boundary between private and public, we see the reversal of the power relationship between Frank and Tracy. I am not including Alice in this power reversal because she is still stuck at the middle of Frank and Tracy’s conflict. At last, with no other way out, Tracy has to break through the fourth threshold — the window that connects the room to the backyard and then the city again. The only escape from an enclosed private space is to illegally break the glass, and from this very moment, Tracy becomes guilty. The transition between private to public is later emphasized by the last chasing sequence in British Museum. And as Tracy ended up on the open roof (by running through the small enclosed gallery rooms), he soon dies from the symmetrical action — falling through the glass. And he remains guilty.

(Due to the format / word count limit, some of the analysis above was not so thorough. I will try to return to these ideas again in my paper or final project.)