Nick Haeffner

Disenchantment and dissociation in Vertigo and Severance

The poet T.S. Eliot coined the term “dissociation of sensibility” to describe a split between thinking and feeling which is connected with the movement from tradition to modernity. In parallel, Max Weber writes of the “disenchantment of the world,” referring to modernity’s othering of religion, magic and myth as a secular, scientific worldview becomes the official ideology of the Western world. Hitchcock’s films frequently seem to dramatise a split between modern, secular rationalism and pre-modern forms of culture, often via the gothic. In Psycho (1960), for example, the house in which Norman Bates lives is representative of a gothic (pre-modern) world of madness and hysteria. However, it’s the eruption of gothic madness into the modern, pristine and orderly world of the chalet next to the house that makes murder so unexpected and shocking. • • In Vertigo, Scotty, a detective who works with logical deduction and evidence, is in thrall to a powerful illusion: a woman who seems to represent a bygone age of unfathomable mystery, romance, chivalry. Scotty succumbs to madness. Nevertheless, it’s his logical and rational mind that solves the mystery. • • In Apple TV’s Severance, the chief protagonist Mike Scout along with other characters has undergone a surgical procedure called severance, which he hopes will enable part of him to live without the traumatic memory of a presumed dead wife, leaving him split between romantic yearning and intellectual detachment. However, as with Vertigo, Mike (a trained, rational academic) is being manipulated using romantic illusion as the bait. This paper will explore the ways in which Vertigo and Severance can be read using the concepts of dissociation and disenchantment to explore a hitherto neglected aspect of Hitchcock’s work, which echoes down through time into Severance.

About
Nick Haeffner is the author of the monograph Alfred Hitchcock (2005). He has lectured widely and published several articles and essays on Hitchcock’s work, including book chapters in The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (eds. Rzepka and Horsley 2011) and Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze (eds. Barton Palmer, Petty, Sanders 2017). While based for most of his career at the Cass School of Art, London Metropolitan University, where he coordinated critical studies for the faculty, he also taught film studies at Birkbeck College/BFI, University of Westminster and Boston University (British Programmes). He is now retired from his university and has returned to his first love, making music.