Sexual Frustration in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope

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On May 21, 1924, two highly intelligent university scholars from Chicago, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, executed their highly-calculated plan for the cold-blooded murder of a distant relative of Loebπs, 14-year old Bobby Franks. As students of Nietzscheπs philosophy, Loeb and Leopold had set out to commit the ≥perfect murder≤ in order to actualize the belief that they were of an elite group, superior to the common man, to whom the standard moral code did not apply. So infamous is the story of their murder and eventual detainment that it has become entrenched in American popular culture, with numerous books and films aspiring to recreate it in vivid detail. Amongst these, Alfred Hitchcockπs Rope (1948) stands out as an exemplary achievement both in its cinematic technique as well as its carefully executed plot, which exposes the psychological decomposition of the two murderers as their deed is gradually discovered. However, the aspect of the real case that is not explicitly addressed in the film as a result of the censorship codes at the time, but one of the primary reasons that Hitchcock was initially attracted to the project, is the homosexuality of the two young men, a factor which becomes pivotal to a Freudian interpretation of the film. It is the shifting and complicated dynamic between their aggression and, more fundamentally, their frustrated homosexual desires which explains the depravity of their actions.

Strewn throughout Rope are many indications that underlying the ostensible story of a murder are unfulfilled homosexual desires of such an intensity that the dialogue and actions of Brandon and Phillip, the names of the two murderers in the film, unintentionally ...

... middle of paper ...

...oing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue≤ (742). Because society prevented them from gratifying their erotic instincts, the boys had to find other means of maintaining their psychic equilibrium, which, in their case, brought with it only deadly results.

References:

Freud, Sigmund. "Civilizations and Its Discontents." The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New

York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.

Linder, Douglas O. ≥The Leopold and Loeb Trial: A Brief Account.≤ Famous American Trials.

1997. November 2, 2004.

Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. James Stewart, Rupert Cadell, John Dall. Videocassette.

Warner Brothers & Transatlantic Pictures, 1948.

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