Rebecca
Welcome to Screen Gems, our weekend delves into adjacent queer and queer headlines from the past that deserve a watch or re-watch.
The climbing plant: Rebecca
Let Alfred Hitchcock make a film about the happiness of the newlyweds transformed into homoerotic paranoia. And leave it to Mr. Hitchock to leave us in conflict over a queer character that’s both awesome and awful. Rebecca tells the story of Mme de Winter (Joan Fontaine at her best), the new wife of dashing widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). What should be a fairytale life for Mrs. de Winter darkens when she arrives at her new home, a Gothic mansion overseen by the unmarried housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Dame Judith Anderson, in her best performance at the screen). Danvers is obsessed with Rebecca, Maxim’s deceased wife, keeping her room like a strange museum and admiring all of his memories. Maxim also appears to be obsessed with Rebecca’s death, and Ms. Danvers begins to train Ms. de Winter to dress and behave like the dead woman. As Maxim grows more melancholy at the memory of his wife, Mrs. de Winter becomes more and more distraught, and Mrs. Danvers becomes more and more aggressive.
Who is in love with whom here? Audiences in 1940 – astute viewers anyway – picked up the coding of Ms. Danvers as lesbian, deeply in love and obsessed with Rebecca. A key scene shows her mocking Rebecca’s underwear, explaining how she could see through. This, guys, was very racy for the 1940s.
Rebecca is one of Hitchcock’s greatest accomplishments: the film won the Oscar for Best Picture, while Hitchcock, Olivier, Fontaine and Anderson were all nominated. Seen today, like much of Hitchock’s work, the film goes both ways when it comes to the treatment of queer characters. On the one hand, the film presents Ms. Danvers as a bloodthirsty obsessive. On the flip side, at a time when hardly any LGBTQ character could appear in movies, Rebecca weaves around the censorship of the time to come up with a coded, complex, and highly memorable gay character.
Is it a lightweight, a win, or both? Opinions about Rebecca, like other Hitchock films such as Rope and Psycho, will vary from viewer to viewer. That said, we offer this observation: Alfred Hitchcock never made a film because he loved a hero. On the contrary, the attraction for him always lies in the villain of a story and in relishing their nefarious plots. In other words, Ms. Danvers is the real star of Rebecca, the character Hitchock loved the most, and her reason for making the movie in the first place. We also don’t think it stems from an enduring homophobia that the late Hitch harbored either. It came from her love for all naughty things.
Seen 80 years later, Rebecca is still one of Hitchcock’s best films and one of the great suspense thrillers. Give him a watch, fall in love with his twisted story, and judge for yourself his treatment of his gay role. Love it or hate it, you won’t soon forget Mrs. Danvers.
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