Hitchcock and the eggheads

Ethel Griffies in The Birds (1963) and Simon Oakland in Psycho (1960)

Speaking of experts, last week, during our Independence Day trip to the beach with my in-laws, I rewatched The Birds for the first time in several years. What most struck me the last time I watched it—how long it takes to get to the bird attacks—seemed less remarkable to me this time. Hitchcock, master craftsman, spends the first half of the film both lulling the audience and foreshadowing the terror to come, all through the whimsical romance he creates in a realistic-feeling world.

No, what struck me this time was Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies), the elderly ornithologist who strides into the film just before the first major attack looking for cigarettes. She knows her birds. She’s observed them for decades and knows what they do and do not do. She has facts and figures, including a strangely precise calculation of the number of birds currently living in North America. Presented with Melanie’s stories of bird attacks, Mrs Bundy pooh-poohs them. Confidently, firmly.

She reminded me of a character who appears at the end of Psycho, the film Hitchcock made immediately before The Birds. Following that film’s unbearably suspenseful climax and shocking twist, Hitchcock treats the viewer to a good five minutes of Dr Richman (Simon Oakland) talking, and talking, and talking. Dr Richman explains to the other characters—and, by extension, the audience—what they’ve just witnessed and how Norman Bates came to be what he is. He knows his Freudian psychobabble and is strangely precise in his diagnosis of Norman. He’s confident, firm. He also feels like he talks forever, a strange inclusion in what is otherwise a terrifically paced, highly visual film.

I’ve seen a few explanations for Dr Richman’s protracted, stentorian lecture:

1. It’s intended as a genuine scientific explanation of Norman and the events of the film based on the pop Freudianism of the day

2. It’s intended as a parody of Freudian psychology and the way it can explain away anything

3. It’s there for structural purposes, to give the audience a few minutes to come down from the suspense and terror of the climax before wrapping up with the film’s genuinely chilling final moments

4. It’s some combination of the above

I think #3 is indisputable as a formal consideration, and so incline toward #4. But which of #1 and #2 is it?

The huge amount of time Hitchcock gives to Dr Richman suggests #1. Hitchcock loved his jokes but constructed them economically. Also, screenwriter Joe Stefano has said in interviews that he was heavily committed to Freudian analysis at the time, so his contribution was probably intended sincerely.*

On the other hand, Dr Richman acts like a blowhard and his explanation is too pat, too easy, fitting the mystery of Norman Bates snugly within the die-cut confines of theory. His explanation—and based on a single police station interview!**—is incommensurate with what the audience has seen over the preceding hour and a half. His confidence smacks of cocksureness rather than insight. Tellingly, even after his lecture we are left uneasy by Norman in his final scene, during which we leave the safe confines of law and order and expertise and travel down the hall to Norman’s cell and whatever is contained there. One senses that the cops guarding the door have a clearer grasp on Norman than Dr Richman.

The Birds reinforced my gut feeling that the latter is the better understanding of Psycho. Here, the expert shows up nearer the middle of the film rather than at the end and—most unlike Dr Richman, whose explanation is seemingly allowed to stand—is thoroughly humiliated. We see Mrs Bundy twice: the first time as an imperious expert holding court, the second as a traumatized survivor of the thing she denied was possible minutes before. She can’t even bring herself to look at Melanie and Mitch.

Hitchcock learning lessons between films? Or simply a difference in source material and screenwriter? I don’t know, but I think Mrs Bundy’s role in The Birds is the better of the two, heightening rather than explaining away the film’s central mystery.

* I know a psychiatrist does appear in Robert Bloch’s original novel, but I haven’t read it and can’t comment on how this information is handled there.

** Mark Twain comes to mind: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.