I know that I want to write about one or a few of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Either Rear Window, Shadow of a Doubt, or Strangers on a Train. In all of them I’m interested in queerness in their main characters. In Rear Window, I’d be interested in a trans reading of the main character L.B. Jefferies mapped onto the gendered space of the apartment to which he is confined, in a sort of forced feminization.
In Shadow of a Doubt, I’m curious about the semi-incestuous relationship between Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie, Uncle Charlie’s queerness in his opposition to the Newtons very traditional nuclear family. Hitchcock repeatedly codes queerness as a literally dangerous threat (in Rope, Strangers on a Train, and arguably Notorious the villainous characters are queer-coded). How does queerness interact with Uncle Charlie’s idealized past with Emma? The film can easily be figured through a series of literary allusions: Uncle Charlie is a sort of snake tempting young Charlie into a life of queer sin. He is rich, aloof, averse to mirrors, foreign in a Dracula-esque way. Uncle and Young Charlie’s relationship is akin to Polyneices and Antigone in Antigone. Young Charlie must choose allegiance to either Uncle Charlie or her detective-boyfriend; which can easily be mapped onto choosing kinship or a surveillance state.
In Strangers on a Train, there’s an argument to be made about the homosocial space of the train and the ultimate destruction and perversion by Bruno of that space.
There could even be a world of comparing some combination of these films; Jefferies' heroic queerness vs Bruno’s perverted queerness. How all of these films uplift heterosexual marriage as the ultimate happy ending.