Despite having made one short film and two feature films, Hitchcock settled on his third production to represent his official directorial debut. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is a film that bears its creator’s signature with such glamour that it is impossible to rate it as an average work of a young filmmaker. There is so much confidence in each shot, so much emotion in the characters’ faces, so much vigour in the editing style; the spectator feels helpless to resist its power.

Ivor Novello, that irresistible Welshman, plays a young man, lodging in the London neighbourhood where an ‘Avenger’ is playing hard at ‘imitating’ Jack the Ripper. In his new residence, he meets Daisy (June), the landlady’s daughter. She’s got beautiful golden curls. He is mysterious, dressed in black, with a scarf protecting his face from cold. ‘He is queer’, says the landlady (Marie Ault), ‘but he’s still a gentleman’. At nights, especially during those when girls with golden curls are found murdered in the dark alleyways, he is not to be found at home. His returns are quiet, so quiet that one may think he is trying not to get noticed.

It is irresistible for any Hitchcock fan to pick out so many themes and motifs that have become truly his in the cinematic consciousness. The blonde girl, innocent, yet sensual, is the target of desire, be that for love or death. The man, innocuous, yet dangerous, is both victim and perpetuator of that desire. The world is the spectator – active, imposing, judging. However, The Lodger also offers us a Hitchcock that we saw only once. The mood of the film, its visual style, play an expressionist game that is nothing but an ode to the great German silent cinema of the likes of Murnau, Lang or Pabst.

We see a director who is learning but also inventing, for his moving shadows are not only passionate, but can also communicate with us, the spectators. Novello’s physical beauty is pertinent in this case. Hitchcock does romanticise his look to the degree that the sublime knocks at the dangerous gate of the infernal. Pabst might have come close to the same look with Lulu in Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box] (1929), yet the lodger is the closest impersonation of Keats’ ‘beauty and death’ dichotomy. His face is used to portray a wide range of emotions that have become almost synonymous with the silent film acting method. His arrival is haunting because it feeds our desire to find a murderer, for us to be content that we are superior to the other characters in the story through our insight. And this is where Hitchcock excels.

From an early stage, he is able to identify a role for the spectator that is not passive. We become a character in this tapestry knit with images. This is different from being an active spectator, for the latter is only a juror who is asked to make a moral judgement at the film’s dénouement. Hitchcock’s spectator-character is unique through the fact that the moral judgement is directed towards itself, and thus is made by the other characters, or the director himself. We want to see a villain, albeit a charming one, in Novello, because the film does not offer an alternative. In a battle against evil, (rape and murder in this case), in the plot in which we find ourselves tangled up, there must be punishment, and so evil must be personified. Its absent incarnation leaves us with no hope of either being lauded for victory or pitied for loss.

The key to The Lodger’s suspense lies in the fact that we are continuously fooled by appearances. The moving image becomes a reality far too cruel because of its lack of stability: it allows us always to find a seeming comfort zone that once found is demolished in front of our very eyes. The simplicity of the plot is what drives that sensation of instability. Essentially, Hitchcock is playing not with what we see, but with what we want to see. Discovering that potential in exploiting the audience has given him a unique insight into the power of film. Cinema is synonymous with representation, thus self-identification. The spectator is not an alien, but a full-bloodied individual who is not just capable of compassion, but of active emotional engagement. The film then becomes more than a mirror to the world we live in, but an intrinsic component of it. The birth of the Hitchcockian thriller was thus a natural necessity for human kind to be able to exploit its most repressed reactions to the surroundings offered by our existence.

When Cronenberg released A History of Violence (2005), audiences found it exhilarating because it awakened certain emotions that seemed pre-historic. In the final scene, our approval of murder was exposed by our desire to see the family reconciled through it. Indirectly, the director took the same line of analysing our interpretations of morality by forcing to admit our utter ignorance of it. This is similar to the individuals condemning Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – the meek have turned into murderers. Except, whereas we are able to view this criticism overtly in Lang’s film, both Cronenberg and Hitchcock refuse to offer us the satisfaction of identifying the faults within our common upbringing. The final chase in The Lodger is effective mainly because we think we know who the ‘Avenger’ is, and thus we root for the protagonist, and we pity the crowd. However, the imagery of the scene tells a different story. Hanging helpless, with his hands tied up, Novello is given as a sacrificial lamb (the closest Hitchcock has ventured into the Christian metaphor of crucifixion), for which we cheer, along with the tormented crowd, because his suffering fulfils our desire to feel alive. We want to see that scene, passionately, as if we are the believers from Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973).

The redemptive power of Hitchcock’s films is precisely what attracted such a huge audience to them. But this is not all. We barely remember his films for their arguable happy-ending. What does remain with us is the paths he has taken. As a director, he has given us the chance to feel emotions that are expressive of our inner being, triggered mainly by our inability to identify at any point in time the causational pattern that has got us there, and more so, our incapacity to grasp the full meaning of that pattern.

As in The Lodger, the truth lies within us, not in the story itself. All of the characters are burned by the same passion of not knowing where to look for answers, but they search. Sometimes they find it, more often they don’t.