The Hitchcock Touch

Stephen Farber uses the sublime Alfred Hitchcock to illustrate how “With a Friend Like Harry” is a classic model of suspense (“Variations on an Always Tense Theme,” May 13). Its beauty lies in its simplicity and the following of formal genre conventions and rules. However, I must disagree on his assessment of “Memento,” and I think Hitchcock would too.

Following in the literary footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, Hitchcock established many of the cinematic rules for suspense thrillers. He also knew that once the audience became familiar with those rules, they could be broken to achieve suspense. Telling a lie in a narrated flashback occurred in “Stage Fright,” decades before “The Usual Suspects.” Having Janet Leigh killed a third of the way into “Psycho” pulled the rug out from under us. Not allowing a satisfying resolution or a “The End” for “The Birds” was a precursor for “Memento.”

We exit the noir thriller “Memento” feeling confused and unsettled. Not only are we missing important pieces to its jigsaw-puzzle plot, Christopher Nolan’s ending throws into question all that we believed true. Thus we are thrust into the same paranoid world as the protagonist where, try as he might, there is no grasping the situation. Ripe for anyone who comes along to take advantage of his handicap, he is merely a cog trapped in a world run by an unseen machine, seemingly without order or logic.

In “trash[ing the genre’s] most basic rules,” “Memento’s” payoff is neither logical nor satisfying. Perhaps that is the point.

RODNEY HEERINGA

West Hollywood

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Farber has missed the point of what Christopher Nolan and M. Night Shyamalan have gleaned from Hitchcock.

It is true that every film enters a tacit contract with its audience. Hitchcock entered a standard contract of conventional narrative. “Memento” director Nolan circumvents this linear narrative to literally erase the short-term memory of his audience, who begins to experience the same handicap of the main character. And to say that the ending of “Unbreakable” is “arbitrary and preposterous” is to misunderstand the logical progression of Shyamalan’s comic-book narrative.

In short, directors today are creating conventions and borrowing from other media. Hitchcock will always be the Shakespeare of suspense film directors, but poets today don’t always write sonnets in iambic pentameter.

PAUL ROSS VERA

Los Angeles

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Many critics are missing something when they call “With a Friend Like Harry” and “Memento” “Hitchcockian.” Because of their low budgets, these films function largely as character studies, with little action. Despite the presence of narrative premises and themes in common with Hitchcock, these films lack a key element of many of his films: big set-pieces.

Hitchcock was, in some ways, the Steven Spielberg or James Cameron of his time. He was committed, in many if not all of his films, to giving his audiences lush, fantastic, intricate action with visceral impact. “Harry” and other low-budget art-house thrillers are Hitchcockian only with regard to one element from Hitchcock’s palette, and while that is good enough for a modern film, these movies are still missing something big. And that is why we still miss Hitchcock.

ERIC CARLESON

Sacramento

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Having seen “Memento” the day before, I found Farber’s article very timely. But while he describes how one walks out “feeling more confused than when you walked in,” we walked out wondering why we bothered to walk in at all.

After giving the film the benefit of the doubt by sitting through the whole boring mess, we wanted to warn the people standing in line for the next showing to go home and watch a “Seinfeld” rerun. It would be time better spent.

NAOMI Z. FELDMAN

Los Angeles