Shadow of a Doubt (1943) review
Little Charlie’s ennui: discomfort with American conformism
Be careful what you wish for. Yearning to escape the dullness and alienation of adorable small town America, with its adorable conformist citizens who always use the crosswalk and conduct their affairs with most distinguished and proper manners— Little Charlie (Teresa Wright) welcomes her much-idolized Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), her namesake, to her "average" American home: and with him, the world's foul sty...
Hitchcock shoots the story as a tale of two worlds and Little Charlie, fully conveyed by Teresa Wright as an all-American girl who’s a bit too smart for her own good, stands in between these two worlds, unable at the end to land her feet on any of them. There is no synthesis of contradictions here: Uncle Charlie's foul sty of a world, with its urban decay and psychopathic deviations, and the priggishly innocent (almost insufferable) Santa Rosa, with its adequate and confident citizens, are never reconciled.
In fact, there's a blindness to the Santa Rosa world that forbids it to see another aspect of reality: they could never understand who the real Uncle Charlie is. In all their common decency and ideological blindness they more easily condemn Little Charlie, who actually knows better, than they realize the moral wretchedness right in front of them, well concealed in the guise of an urban silver-tongued devil.
Like most Hitchcock films, Shadow of a Doubt concerns epistemic upheaval. It’s a tale on the dangers of knowledge. What happens once you know? Knowledge has a way of spoiling things, shattering hopes, replacing epistemic doubts for moral ones, curiosity for despair. It’s a traumatic experience that of realizing it was all an illusion. Once Little Charlie knows her Uncle Charlie is a serial killer her world collapses: her previous notions of good and evil, family and loyalty, her very conception of herself, for she identified Uncle Charlie as a soul mate–– it will ever be the same and she cannot undo it.
Little Charlie’s morbid ennui – the girl who knew too much – and the psycho-sexual incestuous tension she has with her nihilist uncle, alongside Hitchcock’s irony of bringing hell into alleged paradise, make this 1943 masterpiece one of the finest, and most macabre, political critiques in cinema.
There is nothing close to redemption in this film: Little Charlie remains morally devastated at her Uncle’s funeral, as the town’s priest makes a warm eulogy to Uncle Charlie, unable to come to terms with striking contradictions. Uncle Charlie did have a point, after all, to the general foulness of the world – he was himself a performative proof of that. Are goodness and decency, like the ones found in Santa Rosa, mere… naiveté and foolishness? It would be nice to have a sequel to Shadow of a Doubt. Little Charlie, turned femme fatale, roams across the country, following her uncle’s footsteps, in an empirical search to prove or refute “the world’s a foul sty” hypothesis. Of course, most of film noir can be thought of in precisely such terms. And prove the hypothesis.
