Confession as betrayal: (Alfred) Hitchcock's I confess as enigmatic text.

Deborah Thomas

Hitchcock's I Confess as Enigmatic Text

Despite its considerable complexities, I Confess has often been referred to in ways which don't fully take these into account. Thus, William Rothman sees the film as a commentary upon "the dark moment in the history of Hollywood at which it was made: its story about the courage and despair of a man scorned for his refusal to testify under interrogation is a thinly veiled allegory of McCarthyism and the blacklist" (The Murderous Gaze, Harvard University Press, 1982, page 248). Rothman, further, sees the refusal of Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) to reveal the secrets of the confessional as an aspect of his "calling as a priest" (page 166). As David Sterritt puts it, "... Logan's predicaments in I Confess stem from his role in the church's centuries-old production..." (The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Cambridge University Press, 1993, page 72), a form of theatre, as it were. Generally, this withholding is seen as laudable, if somewhat uninteresting, despite more ambiguous tendencies on Logan's part towards martyrdom or overweening pride. One of the things which seems to have been overlooked, however, is the extent to which the film text of I Confess itself withholds knowledge from the viewer in various ways.

Clearly, crucial factual information is withheld: most surprisingly, we never learn with any certainty whether Logan and Ruth (Anne Baxter) commit adultery in the summer house. Robin Wood argues that, whereas the flashback visually suggests that they do, Logan's "obviously sincere testimony" (Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Faber and Faber, 1991, page 84) makes clear that they don't, the resultant lying flashback understandable as a wish-fulfilment on Ruth's part. It seems to me that neither flashback nor testimony is unequivocal in this way. I am more persuaded in the case of the flashback, where Michael's loving look at Ruth as she awakens -- in contrast to his earlier anxious hesitations -- suggest a barrier has come down between them and some sort of fulfilment achieved. But the striking aspect of his present-day testimony at his trial is the care with which he chooses his words. Thus, his response -- "I can't say" -- to the prosecutor's question as to who put the bloodied cassock in his trunk, while literally true, is clearly intended to deceive, its words meant to be taken to imply lack of knowledge ("I don't know"), rather than deliberate withholding of the truth ("I refuse to say"). The fact that his testimony is not "obviously sincere" in this respect suggests that we should pay close attention to his words with respect to his relationship to Ruth as well. When asked whether he and Ruth were "such good friends that you spent the night with her," Logan simply comments, "We were caught in a storm," though the flashback implies they had already missed the last ferry back when the storm broke (Ruth's words in confessional voice-over -- "I didn't know what time it was, but it was late. We'd missed the last ferry back from the island" -- are given their visual equivalent through her shaking her stopped watch, broken by the rain, only minutes after the outbreak of the storm). "Oh, the storm was the villain," replies the prosecutor tellingly. Logan's response -- "I saw nothing wrong with being caught in a storm" -- while reasonable enough, both evades the issue of his responsibility and leaves a great deal unsaid. As with Logan's omission in reply to the question as to the discrepancy between the account of Keller (O.E. Hasse) and his own ("It could have been eleven forty-five. The rest isn't true"), a statement of fact ("We were caught in a storm," "It could have been eleven forty-five") acts as decoy for what is withheld. It is surely significant, however, that, whereas Logan explicitly denies Keller's account ("The rest isn't true"), while withholding an alternative version, he does not deny the adultery with Ruth, which is perfectly by compatible, after all, with being caught in a storm. In any case, a metaphorical reading of storms as correlatives of emotional upheaval is readily available to viewers of such Hitchcock films as Rebecca, Psycho, and Marnie, the association of stormy weather and momentous events a commonplace of melodramatic rhetoric generally. On this reading, being "caught in a storm" becomes a thinly disguised admission of Logan's surrender to sexual desire. In its simultaneous assertion of fact and denial of guilt, Logan's statement is one of several exculpating confessions which punctuate the film. Compare Keller's somewhat overdetermined confession to his wife (Dolly Haas): "... I didn't mean to kill him. Oh, Alma, I'm not a murderer, it was an accident, it was the money. How could I watch you work so hard?", the excuses spilling out in indecent profusion. In contrast, the innocence of Logan's inadvertent adultery seems supported by the film, reinforced by the fact that he was unaware of Ruth's marriage at the time, and had not yet become a priest. Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on whether his motive in becoming a priest stems from the revelation of Ruth's betrayal of him in having married another man, the revelation occurring at precisely the moment when his sexual anxieties appear to have been overcome.

The obscurity of Logan's motive in becoming a priest and Ruth's marrying Pierre Grandfort (Roger Dann) is another instance of the film's wilful opacity. However, a tentative coherence can be given to both events in the developing context of Ruth and Michael's relationship. Michael's ambivalence to Ruth is apparent at a very early stage: he enlists in the army, declines to get engaged to Ruth, and advises her not to wait for him, the combined effect of such behaviour a clear case of protesting too much, the implied anxieties surrounding a fully sexual relationship with Ruth denied through an embracing of the `manly' pursuit of war. As Larrue (Karl Malden) remarks, "I believe you were awarded the military cross... you seem to have done a number of brave things," and Logan's final pointless confrontation of an armed and hostile Keller -- his intervention leading to Keller's death since the police are obliged to shoot him when he threatens Logan -- takes such courage to the point of absurdity. It follows on from Keller's taunting of Logan, whom he mistakenly assumes to have betrayed him ("You are a coward, like all other people, aren't you? A hypocrite, like all the rest..."), implying that Logan has a deep-seated need -- to the point of self-destructiveness -- to prove his manhood through courageous acts. At the same time, he withholds his sexuality (rechanneling it into such acts of excessive bravery) by refusing to get engaged or have Ruth wait for him -- and ultimately by becoming a priest. Logan's anxieties about his relationship with Ruth are further underlined both by Ruth's remark to Logan on the ferry ("Are you afraid of me? Why?") and by Larrue when he asks Logan why he doesn't want Ruth to reveal the basis of Villette's (Ovila Legare's) blackmailing of her ("What are you afraid of?"). Although the implied love-making in the summer house provides a contrast to Logan's tight control over both his words and sexuality elsewhere, producing the film's only image of him as fully relaxed and free of anxiety, it is a short-lived release, Villette's appearance and addressing of Ruth as `Madame Grandfort' making her use and betrayal of Logan suddenly overt.

So the course of Logan's relationship with Ruth may be seen as a series of betrayals and retaliations. In response to Logan's inability right from the start to give himself fully to Ruth, as evidenced by his eager embracing of the war and her hostile response ("He was one of the first to volunteer. I hated him for that"), we have Ruth's marriage to Grandfort, an action inadequately explained by the mere fact that Michael has stopped writing to her (yet another instance of his withholding). If Ruth's marriage is a retaliation for Michael's insufficient love ("He didn't know he could never love me enough"), then his becoming a priest is an answering retaliation on his part for the revelation at the summer house of Ruth's marriage to Pierre. Ruth's confession to Larrue of her past involvement with Logan -- which, though ostensibly intended to provide him with an alibi, only implicates him further by providing a motive for the murder ("I was going to help Michael; I've destroyed him") -- can be seen as a further response on Ruth's part to Logan's refusal to reciprocate her love, both in general terms (by becoming a priest) and specifically (on the ferry). So Logan's initial flight into war sets off a chain of events which culminate in Ruth's confession. Thus:

Logan goes to war -- Ruth marries Pierre -- Logan finds out Ruth is married -- Logan becomes a priest -- Ruth confesses

From the decisive moment of Ruth's wedding onward, Villette is closely linked to each of these moments of betrayal.

That the film text of I Confess is deliberately enigmatic, raising numerous questions of interpretation of facts and motivation while withholding evidence which would make a preferred reading salient, is nowhere more apparent than in the treatment of Villette. That aspects of the film seem intentionally opaque, accessible only to readings which go beyond `naturalistic' ones, is confirmed by Hitchcock's response to Truffaut's remark to him about a central implausibility in the plot: "... Isn't it a rather formidable coincidence that the murderer who has killed him in order to rob him should happen to confess his crime to the very priest who was being blackmailed by the dead man?" "Yes, I suppose so" (Francois Truffaut's Hitchock, Panther Edition, 1969, page 249). Hitchcock's reluctant acquiescence hints at the irrelevance of such a coincidence, intimating that a different sort of logic is at work, a more symbolic mapping. As suggested above, the most obviously symbolic character in the film is Villette, who first comes to Ruth's notice as an uninvited guest at her wedding whom neither she nor her husband knows (a fact made clear by their puzzled exchange of looks). Larrue, in the course of interviewing Logan after Villette's murder, enlarges the extent of Villette's function as an unknown quantity: "No one seems to have known this Villette. And yet he was a lawyer, he had clients. Not one of his clients had any information to give about the man..." As if to underline Villette's function as symbolic marker in Hitchcock's fiction, Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance in the background of one of the film's first few shots as he walks away from the direction of the murder scene only minutes before Keller leaves the scene in the opposite direction. Hitchcock, as director, as much as Keller, as character, has killed off Villette for reasons not accessible to a reading which takes Keller's confession as the film's only account, though in terms of the narrative it is obviously meant to be taken as true enough. The film's title (I Confess), with its direct address to the viewers, is, perhaps, further evidence that Hitchcock is asserting his own complicity in the crime.

So what does the murder of Villette signify? Ruth's reaction to Villette's death -- "I can't believe it -- we're free" -- as voiced to Logan the following morning raises the possibility that Keller in some sense performs Logan's act for him (after all, Logan had told Ruth not to worry, that he would deal with Villette, though we never find out how he intended to carry this out). So, on this reading, what Logan desires, Keller enacts. Clearly Keller is himself unaware of Hitchcock's possible use of him in such a way, as he has no notion of being a character in another's fiction. It is true that he may resent Logan, despite disclaimers to the contrary ("You saw that my wife and I were not common servants. It was you who found more pleasant tasks for us..."): there is, after all, not much evidence to suggest that they are treated any better than servants, and his stated motive for robbing Villette is to liberate his overworked wife Alma from such drudgery, though the ease with which he kills her prevents this motive from being fully credible. The donning of a cassock to perform the robbery hints at an unconscious desire to implicate Logan which pushes towards increasingly conscious enactment (the confession to him, the planting of the bloody cassock in his trunk, his testimony at the trial). But Keller's implicating of Logan serves another purpose than his desire for revenge alone: it allows Ruth (as well as Larrue) reasonable grounds to believe in Logan's guilt. If Keller claims to have acted on Alma's behalf ("It was my wife working so hard"), an alternative scenario will allow Ruth to believe Logan has acted on hers. That is, if Logan is guilty of killing Villette, this can be taken as evidence of his love for Ruth after all. Clearly, in these terms, Ruth has a stake in believing him to be guilty. Although Larrue withholds the time of Villette's death from her until her confession is out, he does not give her a false time of death either, so she has no grounds to assume her having been with him until eleven establishes his innocence of the crime. It is only when Keller's words, on thinking himself to have been betrayed by Logan ("So the priest talked"), give away irrevocably his own guilt, that Ruth can be sure of Logan's innocence, upon which she immediately leaves with Pierre, freed from her illusion that Logan might finally have loved her enough.

So Ruth's confession serves a pair of ulterior purposes from her point of view in both supplying Larrue with a motive to implicate Logan in the crime (thus, constituting an act of revenge on Ruth's part) and publicly displaying that motive as proof of Logan's love for her through her testimony at his trial (providing a vindication of her own devotion). Indeed, Ruth has fairly consistently pushed for public displays of her relationship with Michael; that such behaviour jeopardises both her marriage and his career as a priest is hardly in conflict with her desires. Thus, she needlessly reveals herself to Villette when he discovers her and Michael together at the summer house ("I was still in the summer house. He didn't know who I was but, apparently, he knew I was a woman, because he made some remark to Michael. Michael knocked him down. I came out and stood on the steps of the summer house and looked down at him..."). Further, she endangers Logan by insisting they meet publicly on the ferry when he is certain to be under observation, and her comment to Pierre about her being with Logan on the night of the murder ("I was with him at the time") -- especially given the fact that Pierre knows of his wife's love for the priest -- is worded and delivered so as to imply an illicit rendez-vous, rather than an innocent meeting with an old friend in order to get his advice, as she later explains it to Larrue. Thus, Keller, Ruth, and, of course, Pierre (who remarks of Logan, "I hope he's in trouble, terrible trouble") all have their own reasons for wanting Father Logan to be found guilty of the murder of Villette. One has only to observe the ambiguous reactions of each of them as they hear he's been cleared.

The version of Villette's murder which sees Keller as Logan's alter ego acting on Ruth's behalf in removing the man who threatens public exposure of Logan's relationship with Ruth is at odds, however, with Ruth's desire (whether conscious or not) to have their relationship go public. Another interpretation of the murder suggests itself whereby the killing of Villette can be taken as the enactment of Logan's desire not to suppress the relationship with Ruth for her sake, but to deny the relationship in opposition to Ruth's desire to have it publicly affirmed. On this reading, Villette becomes Ruth's agent in threatening to reveal their affair, and his murder becomes an indirect murder of Ruth (or, at any rate, the threat she represents), producing a partial resolution of the ambivalent feelings of desire and anxiety aroused by her in Logan. The links between Villette and Ruth are further suggested by the manner in which we discover his dead body, dressed in white and lying on his back on the floor of his house, which we see as the camera leads us in through an open window (presumably Keller's point of entry, but surprisingly left wide open throughout the attempted robbery, in the course of which Villette interrupts him and is killed). The parallels with the love-making scene in the summer house are startling -- Ruth dressed in white and the gazebo itself an open and flimsy structure -- in contrast to the locked doors of the buildings where Michael and Ruth first seek shelter, and here too they are interrupted by Villette. Surely it is not too fanciful to suggest that Villette's body in white sprawled on his back on the floor of his house -- the one missing element in the summer house scene -- has its implied counterpart in Ruth's body in white on the floor of the gazebo in the scene of love-making which Hitchcock withholds. Such a parallel reinforces not merely the way in which Villette and Ruth are linked but the way in which the symbolic murder of Ruth (displaced onto Villette) is a murder of her precisely in her aspect as an object of Logan's desire. That Logan's desire for Ruth is ambivalent and laced with anxieties about his `manliness,' as I've argued, further suggests, however, that Villette signifies not just Ruth's threatening desirability but also the threat to Logan of his own `feminine' side, Villette's demeanor and even his name -- in contrast to Keller's more `masculine' one, say -- supporting a sense of him as feminised and thus as a possible projection of Logan's uncertain masculinity itself. In this context, it is worth remembering that Logan too, at one point in the film, is seen in white, when wearing his lacy priestly garb.

What we've seen in all this is the extent to which I Confess is a text whose events lend themselves to a range of varied interpretations. This is certainly not peculiar to this film alone, but what is more unusual is the unavoidable sense that such ambiguity is part of a deliberate strategy. Further, the viewers' difficulties in extracting and deciphering motives and facts when so much is withheld have their narrative parallels in Larrue's attempts to solve the crime (the fact that the trial judge disagrees with the jury's verdict is further evidence of the difficulties of this endeavour). As the Crown Prosecutor, Robertson (Brian Aherne) remarks to Larrue, "And now here you have a case in which there are no clues, no fingerprints, no motives, no suspects." How to make sense of the murder -- and from the viewer's standpoint, the movie as a whole -- becomes the subject of an instructional scene between Logan and Larrue, which merits quoting at some length:

Larrue: But you do understand, don't you, that I must consider every scrap of information?

Logan: Yes.

Larrue: When a murder has been committed, each scrap of information is important to the police... You see, with a murder, one has to jump from one detail to another. Forgive me, perhaps I jumped too suddenly for you.

Logan: Well, it seems maybe I don't follow as fast as you jump. I have a methodical mind -- I do have to take things one by one.

Larrue: So do I. So do I. The difficulty, perhaps, is that, un, well, we aren't thinking from the same point of view. Could it be that, Father?

Logan: It could be. I don't really know what your point of view is.

Larrue: Oh? Then I put it badly, very badly. Let me try again.

Logan's response to Larrue's deductions is to warn him against too ready a trust in surface appearances: "Well, then, I would say that a man of intelligence would not be led to believe anything on so little evidence" (a comment echoed, parenthetically, by Father Millais (Charles Andre): "... of course, one should not judge on so little evidence," when discussing advertisements for paints with not smell). But the characters do believe things on too little evidence. Thus, when Larrue questions the schoolgirl about the man she saw leaving Villette's house on the night of his murder -- "But you are absolutely sure he was a priest?" -- she affirms this with confidence, based only on the fact that he was dressed in a cassock. (Perhaps we are being enjoined to question Logan himself being a `real priest' free of secular desires just because he wears a cassock -- the otherwise enigmatic point-of-view shot of a suit of men's clothes which Logan sees in a shop before he turns himself in to Larrue supports this view.) When the two schoolgirls are first brought in to Larrue for questioning, the obvious disappointment of the Crown Prosecutor provides another clear example of an obviously unwarranted expectation on his part that they would be attractive young women, rather than, literally, girls. Further, when asked about Logan's whereabouts on the night of the murder, one of the priests tells the investigating policeman, "but I'm perfectly sure it was all right," though Logan was, in fact, out driving with Ruth. the final and oddest example -- and an instance I can make sense of in no other way -- is when Father Benoit (Gilles Pelletier) asks Alma to have her husband check the flat tire on his bicycle, and Keller later remarks, "But the tire wasn't flat after all, Alma." The film is clearly signalling to its viewers both that we must look beyond misleading appearances and that the meanings we take away from the film will be relative to the points of view we choose to adopt.

The arbitrariness of this last example is pushed even further in the falling over of Father Benoit's bicycle in the rectory corridor. The frequency with which such random events may occur in our lives offscreen does little to vitiate the oddity of an event so unmotivated and unanchored in the narrative world, such are our expectations that a film's events don't merely happen, they signify. Its purpose in defying our best attempts to place it within a coherent interpretation of the film's events can only be to remind us of Hitchcock's irreducible presence within the text. Larrue shifts from hostility towards Logan to sympathy and identification as he abandons his belief in Logan's guilt and readjusts his `reading' of events and motives. This parallels our own shifts as viewers as we try out and discard a range of interpretations, finally settling on the one that most coherently maps onto the narrative world. Yet Hitchcock is at pains to insist on his final right to withhold any basis for a definitive reading (both of the falling of the bicycle and more generally) in order to assert his vocation as author of the text. A moment which has not clear meaning within the fiction may have meaning as fiction. That is, the very fact that it's Hitchcock's fiction is its meaning. We're back to Hitchcock's cameo appearance in the film where we saw that Hitchcock, as much as Keller, kills Villette. That they both have wives named Alma underlines the point.