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Analysis Of The Final Scenes Of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious

Analysis of the Final Scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious


After viewing Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious for the first time, the film
did not strike me as particularly complex. Nothing specific about the film
lodged itself in my brain screaming for an answer—or, at least, an attempted
answer. Yet, upon subsequent viewings, subtle things became more noticeable.
(Perhaps Hitchcock's subtlety is what makes him so enormously popular!)
Hitchcock uses motifs and objects, shot styles and shifting points of view, and
light and dark to help explain the relationships between Alicia, Devlin,
Sebastian and Mrs. Sebastian, and an overall theme of being trapped. An
analysis of the film from the first poisoning scene to the final scene in the
film shows how the above tools lead to a better understanding of the
character's motivations.

The most obvious recurring object in the final scenes is the poisoned
coffee cup. In the first scene of the portion being analyzed, Sebastian
suggests to Alicia that she drink her coffee, and Hitchcock zooms onto the
object as she slowly takes a sip. In a later scene, Mrs. Sebastian pours the
coffee into the cup for Alicia, and sets it on a small table in front of her.
Here, Hitchcock not only zooms in on the small teacup, but heightens the sound
it makes connecting to the table, includes it in every shot possible, and shows
us not only the full coffee cup, but the empty cup as well after Alicia has
drank it. Again, the cup is zoomed in on after Alicia realizes she's being
poisoned. Because the coffee is poisoned, the coffee itself becomes a metaphor
for life and death, supported by the fact that the poisoner herself ours it,
and the shots of the full and empty teacup. In this way, it also suggests
Alicia's inability to escape her situation—whenever she drinks the coffee, she
becomes trapped due to the poison in her cup—and the poison in her sham of a
marriage..

A repeated object not so noticeable is Mrs. Sebastian's needlework.
Mrs....