The Weight of Memory in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940) – Part 2

Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film—part love story, part ghost story, part courtroom melodrama—centers on a poor, timid young woman who falls in love with wealthy aristocrat Maxim de Winter, a widower tortured over the death of his first wife. When the young woman becomes the second Mrs. De Winter and moves into Maxim’s estate, she finds her predecessor’s initials stamped all over the house, and its staff in thrall to her beautiful, vibrant memory. But at the heart of the first Mrs. De Winter’s legacy lies a rot, and just what that rot represents in the film—be it the oppressions of vitality and ambition, the wages of class mobility, the unruly desires of sexuality, or the latent evidence of civilizational decline—is our subject today. Wes & Erin discuss the 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Upcoming Episodes: Emily Dickinson, Rosemary’s Baby. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Welcome to part two of our discussion of the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca. We just got done talking about, but I think are going to continue talking about Mrs. Danvers relationship to Rebecca and specifically maybe how she's facilitated her affairs with Favell, possibly others. Just thinking about the fact that Favell calls her Dany and the fact that George Sanders has, you know, he sort of like famously had his own kinds of sexually ambiguous qualities. We did another movie with him, right? 1:04 Wes: He's a bit of a metrosexual. 1:05 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In All About Eve, he's yeah. He's seen as maybe being gay. Right. So I think there's ambiguous sexuality on the part of both Danny Danvers and George Sanders character Favell. So the fact that they're in this triad with Rebecca kind of complicates that. 1:25 Wes: Yeah. So there's a certain point where she eavesdrops on Mrs. Danvers, telling Jack not to come again. So Danvers says, I don't think it's wise for you to come here, Mr. Jack. And eventually he says, yes, we must. Well, he says, it's just like coming back home. She says, quiet it. He says, yes, we must be careful not to shock Cinderella. Goodbye, Mr. Jack, and be careful. Right. So there's indications that even though she's resisting him coming around, it's not because she has any sympathy for Joan Fontaine's character or is interested in the ethical aspect of it. It's more of a practical interest in helping him stay covert. What's that? And then, of course, he goes to the window. 2:13 Erin: Yeah, yeah, he. 2:14 Wes: And flirts with Joan Fontaine's character. Yeah. 2:17 Erin: So sort of. Sort of. 2:19 Wes: Should we call her Mrs. De Winter now? She. Is it okay to. Is it mdw. It's just too formal for her. It's too. 2:28 Erin: I know, yeah. 2:30 Wes: But anyway, so, yeah, he goes and makes references, you know, to like, Max leaving his little bride all alone. Isn't he afraid someone's going to come down and carry you off? So quite a sinister. Or it's like the wolf showing up and, you know, with drooling and. 2:47 Erin: Yeah. I take the stepping through the window to be quite a violation. He's violating a boundary. Breaking and entering, sort of. Yeah. The fact that Mrs. Danvers facilitates this relationship to like, you know, this is another indication that she puts the sort of like, vitality that Rebecca represents over and above any sort of allegiance that we might associate with her position to the reputation of the house, you know, protecting the actual master of the house and of the sort of like, ancestral line there that it represents. So again, it's as though Rebecca is this super aristocrat. Like, she's. By temperament, she is more worthy of being aristocratic than Maxim himself, even though she is not a blue blood. And so Mrs. Danvers serving her and facilitating this affair with Favell, who was a used car salesman, let's not forget, 3:42 Wes: it turns out, yeah, he's a very aristocratic seeming car salesman. 3:50 Erin: England is full of them. I guess. It's hysterical. 3:55 Wes: One must do what one can get by in these times when all the old money is dried up. 4:03 Erin: Yeah, it's such a strange thing. I had forgotten about that when I rewatched this. I was like, he's a huge star 4:10 Wes: salesman to find that out. Yeah, yeah. I see Rebecca, despite her aristocratic vitality, let's say, and polish and beauty, as introducing a bit of perversity into the house. And then Danvers seems to want to facilitate that. Right. To help facilitate it in some way, even though here she's rebuffing Jack a little bit. And then later on he'll, you know, she'll come in and he'll say, you know, Dany, all your precautions were in vain. The mistress of the house was hiding behind the door. What about presenting me to the bride? We get the sense that. I don't know, my general sense from the entire context of the movie is that she's kind of been a facilitator of this affair and that, in a way, she's in cahoots with Favell, and her principal interest is not in serving Maxim or his interests, but in sort of being a conduit for the introduction of this. Something very different into the house, something that undermines it. Something that maybe. And maybe. And maybe you suggested this before, but perhaps Rebecca is more truly aristocratic in spirit or something. 5:26 Erin: Yes. 5:27 Wes: That's what she's bringing in, so to speak, into the house to kind of, you know, you could say, liven it up, even though it's very destructive. And you can see why Danvers, who is lacking in vitality, would be in search of what she thinks is vitality, although in this case, it's a vitality that's too indiscriminate and destructive. Right. It's not a stable vitality. It's sort of a whirlwind that's going to lead to bad things. 5:55 Erin: You're right. It's the sea itself. Right. So she wrestles with the sea. Right. And it takes her over. This is Mrs. Danvers obsession with the sea. This is why Mrs. Danvers ultimately burns down the house. I think she is disenchanted. She becomes disenchanted with Rebecca as a symbol of vitality once she discovers that Rebecca was not teeming with further life, but in fact with cancer. And what that represents. Right. The loss of vitality that that represents. I'm interested. I love. 6:25 Wes: Interesting. Okay, I didn't see that. Yeah. 6:27 Erin: The great essay by Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, has quite a bit to say about the cultural associations with cancer on the one hand and tuberculosis on the other. So the idea that tuberculosis in the cultural consciousness is something which is the result of too much vitality, you know, which burns you up, which eats you up, you know, it wastes you. Versus the ideas of cancer as being this idea of not expressing too much. You know, the idea, I think the pathology of cancer was something that you got from underusing not expressing enough vitality with sort of like keeping up stores in reserve, which then kind of rotted inside you. So you then end up becoming. Not wasting yourself away, but of sort of becoming pregnant with your own lack of vitality. Right. Expanding that the tumor is the thing that expands inside you. 7:22 Wes: Right. And you can see the analog to having a baby. 7:26 Erin: Right, Right, right. It's the twist on the baby. Exactly the way that Rebecca is using Rebecca, the film is using this twist. So the last thing we would expect would be for someone like Rebecca to have a metaphoric ailment like a tumor. You know, it's the last thing that she expected. She expected to be pregnant, which is why she was going to this doctor who is sort of implied to be an abortionist. Right. So she thinks that she's pregnant. She obviously is in some way aware of a foreign body inside her. Right. That she would go to an abortionist to get this done. 8:04 Wes: Right. 8:05 Erin: And it turns out to be a tumor rather than a baby. So rather than moral life, it is a tumor. And this seems to be the thing that breaks Mrs. Danvers because she's surprised that Rebecca did not tell her about a pregnancy, but she seems okay. And then when she discovers that it's cancer, that's when she burns the house down. Her symbol of vitality has the sort of like anti vitality symbol in her center. So something about what Mrs. Danvers has been serving has been a lie. And she has to sort of self immolate to escape that realization, Burn it all down because it was somehow rotten to the core. And maybe because then she realizes that what she was facilitating in terms of perpetuating this vitality was in fact itself a kind of rottenness. Right. A kind of perversion. 8:50 Wes: Wow. Really interesting. Yeah. I mean, it does give you a good contrast between the type of vitality which is uncontained and destructive, like potentially the ocean or cancer. Right. Because cancer is just particular cells have become immortal and disregard the boundaries of other organs in the body and will just continue to grow and grow and grow. And you can keep cancer cells alive in a petri dish forever. Right. They will just continue to divide. They don't. They don't undergo apoptosis, they don't kill themselves the way A normal cell would. And so unconstrained vitality is destructive if you need it to work and play its part within a larger structure, within a larger stable structure, including a real relationship to someone. Her vitality, that's why I call her party Girl, presumably involved numerous relationships with different men and having, overall, in general, having a good time. And she certainly wasn't interested in the marriage and even made that clear. I'm just using you and you're stuck with me, but. Right, so if it had been a baby, it would have been more representative of the stable and renewing form of vitality as opposed to the destructive form. So what you said. Yeah. Makes me think that Danvers had a kind of insight at the end into her confusion between one sort of vitality and the other. What she thought she loved in Rebecca or idealized in Rebecca, turned out to be something essentially destructive or self destructive. And for someone like Danvers, who's probably already pretty depressed, it's like, oh, I thought I had found a way out. I thought I'd found a solution, but it's just more of this, it's more of my bullshit, you know, or my self destructive. 10:46 Erin: And yeah, yeah, the realization that that represents for Mrs. Danvers and the fact that, you know, Rebecca didn't die sort of heroically struggling with the sea and then being, you know, reabsorbed into the wild forces from which she came, but with this cancer, I think, actually kind of disguises what is the true, for me, what is the true heroism of Rebecca in that moment. You know, one of the things that Sontag talks about in that essay is the shame associated with cancer societally. And one of the reasons why she wrote this essay when she did in the late 70s, I believe, was because she herself had cancer and was receiving her test results and updates from the doctor by mail in unmarked brown envelopes. Because the idea is that even, and this is in the late 70s, you know, that cancer was such a shameful thing, such an unspoken thing. It was a assumed that the person afflicted with it was keeping it a secret from everybody around them. And in fact, more often than not, what you would have when it was inoperable, when it was progressed enough that there was no hope, what often happened was that the cancer was kept from the person with the cancer himself or herself. This was something that the family knew, and they would deliberately keep the person afflicted with it in the dark so that they could not be. So that they would not be tortured by the knowledge that they had this Rapidly arriving expiration date, you know, in ways that we just can't appreciate now. In 1940, there were so many cultural stigmas surrounding cancer. And the fact that Rebecca kind of inverts that relationship, like, keeps it, she's the one who knows that she has it and she doesn't tell anybody else, is the opposite of what would normally happen if she were going to a family doctor that Maxim, say, was also going to, this almost definitely would have happened, which is that Maxim would be informed of what she has and everybody else around her would know, but she 12:48 Wes: would not know unless she walked in on the celebration. 12:51 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Right. Why is there this, like, ugly looking thing? 12:56 Wes: What's the champagne for? It's not because you have cancer. 13:02 Erin: Oh, okay then. Good. 13:03 Wes: Oops. 13:07 Erin: Right. But you know what I mean? Like her ability to face this head on. And I mean, she does this in a. She then does this by goading Maxim into killing her. Right. But there's a strange. I mean, there's a reading of this film in which she, as a kind of Byronic anti hero, is actually like this sort of triumphant main character. I think that there are things about Rebecca that are tremendously attractive for me anyway. You know, she's this great, amazing force that maybe I'm just like a Mrs. Danvers, but I can't help but admire it. Right. And so I think in death she actually, or in the confrontation with this cancer, she actually, in a strange sort of way, like, proves her mettle. Even if Mrs. Danvers can't appreciate that or sees it as a betrayal, sees this thing, which, you know, of course you can't control as being a betrayal of her vitality, I think she kind of actually proves a sort of heroine in this confrontation. And it's just unfortunate that Mrs. Danvers can't see that. 14:03 Wes: Well, let's look at Mrs. Danvers understanding of her death. And this is at the point where Mrs. Danvers has tricked Joan Fontaine's character into wearing a dress and a costume for the ball that make her look just like a portrait of Rebecca. 14:21 Erin: No, a portrait of an ancestor of Maxims. Rebecca is. 14:26 Wes: Okay, So I think thought I understood that to be an ancestor. Yeah. Danvers is saying that was an ancestor of Maxims and then it turning out to be Rebecca. That's why everyone was upset. 14:35 Erin: No, it turns out to be Rebecca did this exact thing at a costume party. 14:40 Wes: Ah, okay. Yes, I see. 14:42 Erin: Wore the same outfit. 14:43 Wes: I get it. Okay, Right. So that leads Joan Fontaine's character to get upset and go up to. To go Upstairs. And ultimately, in the end, we get Danvers following her. And at a certain point, Joan Fontaine's character says to Mrs. Danvers, why do you hate me? What have I done that you should ever hate me? So Danvers says, you tried to take her place. You let him marry you. I've seen his face, his eyes. They're the same as those first weeks after she died. I used to listen to him walking up and down, up and down, all night long, night after night, thinking of her suffering torture because he'd lost her. I don't want to know. And she says, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Danvers, you thought you could be Mrs. De Winter, live in her house, walk in her steps, take the things that were hers, but she's too strong for you. You can't fight her. No one ever got the better of her. Never ever. So never, never. She was beaten in the end, but it wasn't a man, it wasn't a woman, it was the sea. So it's important to Mrs. Danvers that. That it was the natural elements that ended up defeating Rebecca, and in a way, something that was, you know, that Rebecca embodied, I guess, the sea, but that it not be another person that defeated her, and I guess defeated her in the sense of replacing her. Replacing her in the affections of Maxim in particular. So when she finds out, out that Rebecca actually had cancer, I mean, you can view that as just another natural cause. Right. At least it's not a person. But it is also Rebecca's own body. It's something internal to her, as you pointed out, maybe something that could be something one could be ashamed of, and certainly not something that is representative, like the sea of vitality or something like that. Although, you know, as we've said, you could see it as representative of a particular kind of vitality in the boundlessness of the cancer cell. 16:45 Erin: I like that. I think you can also see it maybe as Joan Fontaine. You know, the cancer is Joan Fontaine coming. Invading. Right. Invading the space. If we think of the house itself as the body of Rebecca, if you will. Right. Like Joan Fontaine is the interloper, is the foreign body that comes in and causes some problems. Right. So. So you could say that, you know, the idea of Joan Fontaine, the idea of a second marriage that might reverse or somehow defeat the first, is Joan Fontaine as well. And we can argue, of course, that Rebecca has created the conditions in which she's going to have to be replaced by somebody else in Maxim's Affections, in the House, if we want to see Joan Fontaine as something like an inevitability, she's also, I think, or the cancer, rather, is also. It's arguably also Maxim, or what Maxim represents, or the idea that her kind of vitality and this aristocracy can't actually cohabitate properly. You know, we should talk a bit about Maxim himself. I mean, I don't want to let him get off scot free because I think that he is the sort of the villain that the film isn't really examining too closely, but which maybe knows, maybe the film knows he is the villain. His passivity. What in him was attracted to Rebecca in the first place? I mean, in a way, Rebecca did nothing wrong. Right. She got this man to marry her because of she. Okay, I mean, I'm going too far there, perhaps by suggesting that she did nothing wrong, she obviously tricked him into thinking that she was in love with him. But insofar as she expressed qualities which he found attractive, we can argue that she didn't do much more wrong than most any other woman in her situation, marrying someone like Maxim. Right. She wanted to make herself desirable to a wealthy, powerful man. So what in Maxim was attracted to her, and then what in Maxim has been destroyed by her? Or his. Or rather were his inadequacies simply revealed by her? You know, what in him then needs to take a child, you know, an emotional and sort of, in terms of maturity, a child who he then can dominate in the way that he has been seemingly dominated by Rebecca. The fact that he seems to have no problem exporting responsibility to the likes of Rebecca, to Mrs. Danvers. All of these things, I think, really, really complicate him as a figure and make us wonder, like what. What happened in the first place that this marriage went on. There's something that he wasn't getting, that he wasn't seeing at the very beginning that allowed the marriage to happen. And that. That reads to me as the kind of willful blindness of someone who's not properly tending himself and his position and his estate. Right. Like he's the one who's let in the sea. It's like he's opened all the doors and windows in a hurricane, and then he gets upset that his house is trashed. Right. You know, so I just want to kind of turn the spotlight there. Yeah. 19:44 Wes: He certainly was not cautious enough. And he's not cautious enough when he brings home the Joan Fontaine character. I mean, it's pretty reckless. 19:53 Erin: Yeah. 19:54 Wes: He subjects her to this marrying a random person. And you get the sense he probably, when he married Rebecca. He was marrying a random person. Attractive, but random. 20:04 Erin: Well, random in what way? I mean, who would fulfill those childlike conditions such that the choice is random? You know what I mean? He seems to need. 20:12 Wes: I think maybe they should gone out on more dates first. Or he should have gotten to know her. 20:17 Erin: Right? Right. 20:19 Wes: Well, he doesn't really know the Joan Fontaine character. 20:22 Erin: Well, what's there to know? To a certain extent, Right. 20:24 Wes: They've known each other a few days when he proposed. 20:26 Erin: Right. I mean, what's there to know? To a certain extent, the whole point is that she's unformed, that she's not. Right. She's not some sort of complex personality. 20:34 Wes: Well, you never know. She could be another con artist. I mean, he got conned once. You'd think he'd be more careful. And I don't know how old Rebecca was when he married her. But what you're calling a child may just be of marriageable age. There's that scene right, where she says, I wish I were a woman of 36. Of 36? Is that the age dressed in black satin with a string of pearls, which I don't quite understand. You're gonna have to explain that to me in a second. But then he says, please promise me never to wear black satin or pearls or to be 36 years old, as if that's old. It's pretty hilarious. 21:12 Erin: Well, yes. 21:15 Wes: And, yeah, not the best thing to say under any circumstance to a woman, but, yeah. So what is this. What is this idea of being a woman dressed in black satin? 21:27 Erin: I think there are undertones of Anna Karenina in that. For me, 36 seems to represent the sort of the height of sexual maturity and sophistication in a woman, that number. I don't know why that number was chosen by either Daphne du Maurier or the script writers, but to me, it is the number I associate with the kind of like full. The full shedding of the look of a young person, a young woman. But not the look of someone who's now aging. Right. Like you're most fully yourself, maybe between something like the ages of 34 and 38, where you're in that phase in which you no longer look like a girl and you don't look like a woman who has lost her looks and who is starting to age. I'm air quoting heavily. Losing one's looks. Right. So it's a sort of like eternal peak. Womanhood. 36, to me. 22:28 Wes: Yeah, this makes sense. 22:29 Erin: And the black satin and the pearls would represent what that means. A Woman at the full height of her sophistication, her desirability, her perhaps something like her cunning. All of these things which have, I think, positive valences for the most part, but which have become fraught in light of Rebecca's life or which could be fraught under the right circumstances. But, you know. But I wanna. You know, and I'm pushing. I'm trying to push against the simple reading of the film with Rebecca as the villain and Maxim as her victim, simply because it's interesting to play with that a bit. I'm not taking this totally seriously, but one can argue that Maxim is doing to Joan Fontaine what Rebecca has done to her. That if Rebecca is the Mrs. Robinson character, you know, he's simply like repeating this cycle, right? He's. He's created conditions in which learning the truth about his marriage, his first marriage, is the only thing that can actually induce real emotional intimacy in his current marriage. And yet he's withholding that. He's withholding the possibility of them being real equals and of them having real emotional intimacy. And then the minute that it is deployed, this information and real intimacy is affected between the two of them. He has injected Joan Fontaine with Rebecca, with a piece of Rebecca, with this story. He's inoculated her from Rebecca in a way, but only by making her a little bit more like Rebecca. And this is something, in fact, that Joan Fontaine has to do, right? She has to be able to stand up for herself. She has to be able to inhabit a more Rebecca like kind of mentality toward the world in order to survive in the aristocratic world of Maxim, right? She can't be a little girl forever. She can't let everybody run roughshod over her forever. She has to ingest a little bit of whatever it is that Rebecca had. But that means becoming more like her. And Maxim is the one who does this. Maxim is the one who sort of taints her, who destroys her illusion. 24:36 Wes: Well, he's rough with her. Yeah. And this destroying of illusions, this is what, you know, one instance of this happens before she makes that wish. So they were driving and she is enjoying herself and says, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up the memory, that bottled up memory like perfume, or the memory like perfume. And it never faded, never got stale. Then whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and live the memory all over it again. This is reminiscent of something she said earlier on, this idea of sticking something you should stick to what is perfect if you find it some very youthful, idealistic things to Say. And then he asks her, what particular moment would you want to keep? All of them. All these last few days, I feel as though I'd collected a whole shelf full of bottles. He says, sometimes, you know, those little bottles contain demons that have a way of popping out at you just as you're trying most desperately to forget. And then she looks dispirited, and then he says, stop biting your nails. So he's very careless. I mean, overall, you get a sense he's an impulsive guy, quickly marrying women that I think he doesn't know well enough to marry. He has anger management issues, as we'll find out. And then he's careless and rough. This is not the only time. Time that he's really kind of callous and careless with her. So I don't know how. She's 23 in this movie, right? 26:04 Erin: I don't know. I never heard. 26:05 Wes: How old is he? How old are they supposed to be? She's supposed to be in her early 20s, and he's supposed to be. 26:10 Erin: Yeah, like 21. And he's maybe pushing 40. 26:13 Wes: Okay. Yeah. So he's with a younger woman, and, you know, he calls her a child at a certain point. Oh, you've got to be careful with children. But he's not careful at all. He's not as careful as he ought to be with anyone of any age, much less with a child. So, I mean, it's a good point. I mean, he's a victim of Rebecca in a way, but obviously there's a reason why he was susceptible to that. 26:37 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And that carelessness, I think, is indicative, too, of this aristocratic quality that he seems to embody. So he's like this aristocracy on the decline that needs the infusion. This is one of the reasons why I brought this up in part one with Mrs. Van Hopper. You know, Rebecca, in a way, represents this sort of, like, American infusion of vitality and not cash, because Maxim doesn't seem to be cash poor. And if he were, he wouldn't be attractive as a mark for Rebecca, but. Right. But she represents something like that infusion of vitality that he needs. But he also, I think, as an aristocrat and as someone who's representative of a fading empire, has gotten into. Into this situation, metaphorically speaking, because of carelessness, because of something having to do with mismanagement and a lack of understanding about the forces with which one is contending. Yeah. So if. If Maxim is something like the British Empire itself, we could see the seeds of empire as being ones in which you know, you are. You're sort of sowing your own destruction by going around unstably, trying to. To acquire things, you know, trying to colonize young women. Exactly, exactly. And I think that that's a position born of a kind of willful blindness and a kind of hubris that Maxim represents. Like he could just go, you know, he trusts himself enough somehow that he could just go out and find someone to marry. And then he's gonna, in fact, he's gonna do it again, right. He lucks out the second time. 28:10 Wes: It's a problem of privilege. He doesn't have to. To do enough for himself. You know, right. When they're talking at the table, like, what is she? What does she do with her time? You know, and then one of the Laceys slips up and says, well, not sailing. It's a good thing. It's not sailing, you know, what does she do? Where doing means, how do you spend all this leisure time? Maxim has someone to manage his estate, right? Crawley. 28:36 Erin: Yes. 28:37 Wes: Who's his friend. So he doesn't even have to manage his. His own estate. 28:41 Erin: That's right. And Mrs. Danvers. 28:42 Wes: Yep, and Mrs. Danvers. So you get a very typical picture of the perils of being the master or the privileged one, which is that you don't get the exercise of having to do things and having to exercise your faculties, physical or mental, and it makes you vulnerable, it makes you obtuse. So this is kind of an inherent fragility in power. And why power? Always, always one of the reasons power tends to overreach. The more power you have, the more mediated your relationship is to reality, let's say, and you become susceptible to all kinds of deception, not just to Rebecca's in the literal sense, but to drinking your own Kool Aid, so to speak, fully investing in a set of ideals that maybe one doesn't even live by. For instance, if you could, you know, if you. This is. Then this is a point, really, I'm making Orwell's point, which is that if you could have absolute power and you could always understand your interest in it in the most cynical and self transparent of ways, as an interest in power, then you might have the flexibility to combat challenges, all challenges to power, and to maintain it, right? To create a stable authoritarian regime, so to speak. Speak. But to the extent that you have to rationalize power and say, well, what I'm doing is actually for the good of all, if I'm colonizing a country, it's for this, that and the other reason. It's not for Just for power and greed and gain. Then you can see why you need to do that psychologically. But you make yourself vulnerable because you're engaged in a kind of self deception. And that self deception becomes the leverage for other people to take you down. In any case, this becomes a basis for Orwell's idea of doublethink, where one, the two strands in doublethink are. Because this is what would be required to maintain power to both. Two, there are reasons why we need to think of what we're doing as good, so that's not actually dispensable. So one needs to be able to rationalize and make up stories about the terrible things one is doing. But also one needs to, to ideally also understand what one's. The real motivations for what one is doing, the real power motivations. So those are the two horns of double think of thinking a contradiction. I think what I'm doing is for the good, and I understand what I'm doing is for power. And that is the only way to sustain a fully authoritarian regime, or fully authoritarian, or totalitarian would be a better word, totalitarian mindset. It's impossible in practice, and that's what. Why totalitarian regimes are so unstable, according to Orwell. But anyway, similarly, any sort of privilege is fragile in the same way. So I think this kind of thing. Yeah, you can see the story as a way in which this kind of thing might play out with a somewhat oblivious aristocratic guy. I don't think it's reading anything into the story to say he's made to look a little bit obtuse in the upper class, you know, privileged Englishman, manner of obtuse, but. Mm. 31:53 Erin: Well, you're making me think of the fact that in Crawley and Mrs. Danvers, he. So he has these proxies and he is also someone who is represented within the film in addition to this sort of like. Like spiritual representation that maybe Crawley provides. You know, we see his photograph on Rebecca's Vanity. We see images of. Of him and of Joan Fontaine in their honeymoon footage. You know, someone pointed out to me, a friend of mine pointed out to me that, like, you know, for a guy who likes to, you know, take video of things and photographs. We don't have any photographs of Rebecca. You know, it's strange that, like, she's right, she maintains this sort of unrepresented quality and, you know, it seems right to me then, based on what you're saying, that maybe Rebecca represents something like this sort of impossible ideal of power, which is, by its impossibility, unrepresentable. And unrepresented in the film, whereas Maxim has all these representations of himself. Right. The other thing I'm thinking about with that is that what Rebecca reminds me of, in addition to being kind of a satanic force, you know, in that, like, she represents the sort of the Byronic anti hero that is best expressed as the, you know, Miltonian Satan of Paradise Lost. She's also like Eve in a way. She's like a perfect. You know, one of the reasons why she might not be represented is, is that she's literally larger than life. There's this idea in Milton and elsewhere, of course, that Adam and eve are like 7ft tall. They're like these, you know, the way he describes them, they're like Scandinavian supermodels. You know, they're like 7ft tall and she has this, like, incredibly long hair. 33:33 Wes: She's in wnba. 33:35 Erin: Right, right. And one of the reasons why that is, it seems, is because of this idea that, you know, that probably goes back to Plato, that the representations that God makes, the pure form, are superior to any representation that we make. So Adam and Eve are pure creations of God, whereas we're the result of human reproduction. You know, we're the sort of like worn out stock that just is, you know, the stamp that then loses its ink after a while. Right. So we're the result of human creation and reproduction. And Adam and Eve were God's sort of like original human, human productions. And so something about that seems to lie at the heart of why Rebecca can't be represented. She's like Eve. She's like this, you know, seven foot tall titan of woman who is bigger than everybody and better than everybody. And we're all just sort of like living in her shadow. We're all just like, you know, the imperfect stamps of her and her hand, you know, this godlike hand is stamped on everything within the house. 34:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that one could say this might be an aspect of every form of idealization, which is that it has the significance of a creative, formative force that lies behind us. Right. So most obvious one is a parental force. So that when we idealize a Rebecca, or when we idealize ourselves, or when we have any sort of aspiration, like a value, a potential occupation, this has something to do with an idealization of a parent or parental interest or social interest, cultural interest, something that stands above us and has shaped us as who we are, or God, a creator force. So I like this idea that she stands in that position and in some sense, I Think it fits psychologically. So what have we missed as we are approaching the end? 35:34 Erin: Maybe just a quick reference to Maxim's sister and her husband, who to me are Austen characters. You know, they're like, they fit the mold of so many Jane Austen characters. Like, say, the older couple in Sense and Sensibility, you know, which makes sense since Manderley and Pemberley are kind of rhyming with each other. The English aristocrat, sweet, harmless version of aristocracy, which is totally unlike the sort of like self destructive relationship of Maxim and Bet. Maybe they provide a kind of a model for what Maxim and Joan Fontaine might end up becoming. 36:10 Wes: You're talking about the Laceys? 36:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. In terms of the universe of the film, Maxim and Rebecca survive. I mean, sorry, Maxim and the second Mrs. De Winter survive as a couple. In the book, they don't. In the book, they never have a real relationship. It's impossible. In the book, of course, he's killed Rebecca and I suppose everybody knows. Again, I'm getting the secondhand, but everybody knows that he has done so, even though he is acquitted in the trial. So his reputation is effectively ruined. And they have to keep kind of traveling around to Monte Carlo and various other places to sort of outrun his reputation, which has been destroyed, like his estate. 36:49 Wes: That's kind of cool. 36:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the marriage never works. 36:53 Wes: I like that fantasy of being on the run. Not from the police or from a killer, but just from one's bad reputation. 37:00 Erin: Yeah, from, from. 37:02 Wes: And just going and to resorts, you know, oh, I'm on the run, I gotta go to the next resort. 37:10 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So, so the marriage never. The marriage does not work in the book. It can never work. And one can see kind of why that is. It seems improbable that they could live happily ever after under these conditions, but they, they, they try to sell it in the scene and in front of the fireplace where they have, you know, her growing up, but them somehow sort of being okay with that, even though she wasn't allowed to grow up. The terms of the marriage change in that scene, I think. 37:35 Wes: Right, okay. All right, well, thank you, thank you, 37:41 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext.