Shadow of a doubt

I want to talk about the other suspect of murdering who remained in Maine. Since this figure has never been formally introduced to us visually, and we only know his relevance to the narrative based on what we hear from the detectives and we only see him when he is put together with Uncle Charlie, let’s maybe call him by the shadow figure. We could imagine the shadow figure as the protagonist in any other Hitchcockian “the wrong man” thriller, where they were wrongly accused and therefore needed to run away from the justice system while trying to prove themselves righteous. If we are in 39 steps or North by Northwest, the protagonist would gain both reputation and love back at the end of the show. Unfortunately, here the shadow figure is more similar to Tracy in Blackmail, dragged (willingly at the beginning) into a series of uncontrollable events that eventually led to a chase until Tracy’s falling through the roof. We knew Tracy was not the murderer, but he was also not “innocent”. What about the shadow figure? We would never get to know if he was any sort of murderer, or completely innocent. He was all at once assumed guilty once the chase began. Right after the death of the shadow figure, the “other” suspect among the duo — Uncle Charlie, was assumed innocent. The double here is put together with the exclusiveness and uniqueness of the murderer’s identity. In addition, Choosing not to portray the shadow figure in Shadow of a Doubt is more than the Hitchcockian economy of narrative, but rather, to really push on the concept of “the shadow” and the duality. The shadow figure is both so important that the plot got to be advanced as we could see Uncle Charlie attempted to kill Young Charlie; and so unimportant that we only knew him by the verbal description of his last actions. This intentional omission of the description of the shadow figure, in contrast with the full portrayal of Uncle Charlie’s cynicism and extremism, created Young Charlie’s world overshadowed by the doubts. We could also see this genre of “the wrong man / the right man” as a thematic double that shows Hitchcock’s satiric comments on the law system. One of the detectives even said explicitly, “Funny if he turned out to be the wrong man.” Characters in Hitchcock’s movies have an innate distrust of the justice system, or an impulsion to escape from the law. In Hitchcockian world, the first reaction of a person (guilty or not) is to rely on themselves to prove their own existence, rather than the law.