What Lies Beneath

The "Hitchcock" Beneath
What Lies Beneath

Laura Laytham

Fall, 2001

Prof. Richard Allen

Hitchcock Course

Amidst the summer blockbusters of the year 2000 Robert Zemeckis, master director of the mindless blockbuster himself, took a step away from his Back to the Future roots to make a visit to the past. His project, as the new film’s producer Jack Rapke explained, was a suspense film — "perhaps the kind of film Hitchcock would have done in his day." It was something Zemeckis had always wanted to do and with What Lies Beneath he finally got his chance. Resurrecting the subplots of a various Hitchcock films as well as employing classical Hitchcockian themes and styles, What Lies Beneath reveals itself to be a modern day Hitchcock film without Alfred Hitchcock.

The film stars Hollywood headliners Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, with Pfeiffer playing the fragile home-alone housewife Claire Spencer who fills her days with suspicions of murder, and Ford playing her skeptical husband Norman who, like so many Hitchcockian leading men, is eventually exposed as the unsuspected villain. The story follows Pfeiffer’s investigation into her neighbors strange behavior and subsequently into the unknown phenomenon that seems to haunt her and eventually wraps up with her elaborate escape from her murderous husband.

At its base What Lies Beneath, which Stephanie Zacharek of Salon says, "is trying to be several different movies at once," is broken up into three subplots. First Claire, while eavesdropping on her neighbors, begins to suspect the husband of murdering his wife. After that theory is disproved, Claire remains haunted by an unsettled female spirit and slowly uncovers the identity of this ghost woman. Finally, the end of the film reveals Norman to be the secret murderer and we follow Claire’s suspenseful attempts to escape from him and his deadly intentions. While the three sections certainly provide a rather drawn out sequence of narratives for this one single film, each serves as a reference and occasion to revisit key Hitchcock films.

The first subplot opens with Claire taking her daughter off to college, leaving her with a case of empty-nest syndrome at home. With little else to occupy her time, Claire soon begins filling her days by spying on her new neighbors, the Fuers. With Claire constantly peaking out her windows and with her subsequent mischievous snooping, we are visually and narratively reminded of the voyeuristic thrills of Rear Window. CNN reviewer Paul Clinton observed exactly this when he says that the beginning of What Lies Beneath "is lifted right out of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Rear Window with Pfeiffer playing the Jimmy Stewart role."

While peeping one late night Claire overhears the husband and wife fighting, much like Jeffries observes his own neighbors doing in his film. The next day she sees Mrs. Fuer (who looks remarkably similar to Claire in a classic Hitchcockian "doubling" motif) crying in the garden and hears her sobbing that she just "can’t take it anymore." That same night Claire then watches through the daunting rain as Mr. Fuer carries a large piece of luggage out of his house, loads it into the trunk of his car and then drives away into the darkness. Of course, just as Hitchcock ordered, Mrs. Fuer and the arguing become noticeably absent the next day and Claire, following the Rear Window recipe, deduces that the husband has in fact murdered his wife.

Claire, like Jeffries, speculates that the large luggage laboriously removed from the neighbors’ home during that eerily rainy night contains the missing wife’s dead body. With these suspicions in mind, she craves evidence and sets out to prove her theory by spying around the Fuer house. For the rest of the first sequence, much as the Rear Window plot follows, the film tracks Claire as she goes snooping and prying about, trying to uncover anything to support her murderous theory. Sure enough the meddling pays off as Claire uncovers what seems like evidence when she spots a shower curtain laid out on the living room floor at the Fuer house and then finds a single shoe left outside with what looks like drops of blood on it.

Unlike Rear Window, however, What Lies Beneath does not stop spinning its narrative web there and instead takes an unexpected turn of events. After a fair amount of investigative work and the emergence of these things that look like proof, Claire finally confronts her shadowy neighbor and tells him that she knows he has murdered his wife. At this point the film departs from the Rear Window formula entirely as the missing wife suddenly and shockingly reappears at her husband’s side.

Claire, forlorn by the incorrect nature of her suspicions, returns home only to have the supernatural activity that accompanied her earlier suspicions continue. This is when, according to Roger Ebert’s review in the Chicago Sun-Times, "Hitchcock would have insisted on rewrites to remove the supernatural and explain the action in terms of human psychology." Conveniently enough (and without Ebert’s notice, apparently), What Lies Beneath takes this opportunity to briefly engage that same idea.

As the Rear Window plot evaporates, What Lies Beneath begins to briefly toy with the themes of Hitchcock’s film Spellbound. After the sudden reappearance of Mrs. Fuer, Claire makes a visit to a psychiatrist to try to uncover the subconscious roots of her haunting ghost. At the psychiatrist’s office more of Claire’s disturbing past is uncovered when a connection is proposed between her recent experiences and a psychological trauma that she suffered exactly a year earlier. Although this scene at the psychiatrist’s is brief (and perhaps one of the more interesting in the film as she sucks symbolically on a red-hot fireball candy while remembering the auto accident which later proves to have been the point at which her husband’s evil side was first revealed), it proposes a clear connection between Claire’s psychosis and the psychosis of Spellbound’s John Ballantine. Unfortunately for Claire, Ingrid Bergman’s Dr. Constance Peterson is not available and What Lies Beneath reverts to further Hitchcockian plots to complete it’s story.

Claire’s suspicions are, after seeing Mrs. Fuer in the flesh, relocated from her dubious neighbor to the apparation that seems to be haunting her in the house. At this point the film relocates its focus from Spellbound and Rear Window onto the premise of Vertigo as Claire realizes that she is being haunted specifically by the ghost of another woman’s spirit. Unlike Vertigo and its focal character Madeleine Elster, however, Claire is consciously aware of the haunting woman and begins to take steps to communicate with her directly. Claire abandons psychological channels and instead employs the psychic channels of a Ouija board and the supernatural potential of a book of witchcraft and magic.

Despite some cheap scares (the candle flame flickering incessantly and the sudden door slam prompted by the entrance of Claire’s dog into the sacred and spooky bathroom), Claire, her Ouija board and her psychic friend fail to effectively contact the dead woman during their supernatural session. After her friend leaves, however, Claire soon learns the true identity of the mysterious woman. (Ironically it is worth noting that this woman/girl is identified as having the initials "M.E.F." which could easily be read as a callback to "Madeleine Elster" of Vertigo and perhaps, with a little wishful thinking, as "Madeleine Elster Ferguson.") Following the advice of her witchcraft book, Claire visits the house of the missing girl and makes off with a lock of her hair in order to try once again to communicate with her spirit. This time, unlike the Ouija board session, she proves more successful and, as in Vertigo, the spirit recklessly possesses Claire and submits her, as it did Madeleine, to danger. Claire, like Madeleine, is lead by the spirit of the dead woman to plunge into the cold lake and is then rescued and pulled out of her trance by the questionably-intentioned leading man (Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo and Norman Spencer in What Lies Beneath).

Once Claire knows who the girl who haunts her is and begins to understand more and more of what the girl is trying to tell her, What Lies Beneath begins to revisit the themes of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. While Rebecca embraced the omnipotent presence of The First Mrs. de Winter (Rebecca) and employed that presence to haunt Joan Fontaine’s The Second Mrs. de Winter, What Lies Beneath reverses the roles and has the young, murdered mistress haunt the unsuspecting wife. In both films the tagline for Rebecca, "the shadow of this woman darkened their love," seems to apply. In Rebecca the new wife seems unable to escape the markings of her husband’s first wife in her new home and eventually uncovers the truth behind Rebecca’s death. Likewise, Claire is unable to escape the ghostly events taking place within her own house and she is eventually lead to uncover the dreadful truth behind the girl’s death. In each film the leading lady is forced to confront her husband’s murderous nature and is lead to that discovery by uncovering clues seemingly planted by the women whose lives were taken by their husbands.

Beyond the similar plot lines, the murdered women in both films and their haunted leading-lady counterparts are strikingly alike in appearance. In Rebecca, The Second Mrs. de Winter is prompted to dress up exactly like a portrait of Rebecca for the costume ball. When she descends the stairs to reveal her costume to her husband, the likeness sends him into horrific shock and finally starts to clue The Second Mrs. de Winter in to her husband’s darker side. Likewise, in What Lies Beneath, Claire and the murdered mistress look so precisely alike that the film toys with Claire’s possessed state by superimposing the younger girl’s face upon her own. When Norman returns home to find the possessed version of Claire seductively waiting for him in a red dress that resembles the one his mistress wore in pictures, he also recognizes the striking similarity and it sends him into utter shock, finally signaling to Claire his true secret nature.

Beyond appearances, the methods of murder for both women are also mirrored between the films. In Rebecca the slain first wife is first murdered and then her body is drowned at sea. In What Lies Beneath the mistress is also first murdered by Norman and then disposed of in a lake. In Rebecca, her body is drowned in a boat while in What Lies Beneath the mistress’s is drowned in a car. When both go missing, the leading men play dumb and it becomes the duty of our leading ladies to bring them to justice.

While the Rebecca similarities continue, the last segment of the film begins to consider other Hitchcock classics as well. As the ends draws near, Claire confronts Norman about his role in the death of the haunting ghost woman and this confrontation spurns Norman’s attempts to murder her. The woman’s ghost, it turns out, is really "a macguffin of sorts," as Micheal Atkinson of the Village Voice notes. The ghost story is merely a device to lead up to the true terror, that of living with a cheating, murderous husband.

While the narrative elements of the attempted murder sequence in the film are not exactly in line with Hitchcock’s Psycho, the resemblance between the bathroom scenes is unmistakable. As Atkinson continues, "the major suspense piece [of What Lies Beneath] involves being drug-paralyzed in a slowly filling tub antique-shopped right out of Bates Motel cabin #1." In Psycho, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who is, like Madeleine Elster, The Second Mrs. de Winter and Claire Spencer, haunted by the presence of a dead woman (in this case his mother), suffers from multiple personality disorder. While apparently overtaken by the spirit of his jealous mother, Norman murders leading lady Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in cinema’s all-time favorite shower scene. Likewise, in What Lies Beneath, Norman Spencer borrows a page from Bates and attempts to murder Claire in a similarly fashioned bathtub.

The leading ladies’ battles against death while trapped in these bathtub/showers are also as paralleled as each Norman’s choice of murderous location. When Claire reaches over the tub’s edge while trapped within it, her pale, bony, outstretched fingers, while gripping and reaching for help, seem completely modeled after Janet Leigh’s outstretched hand in one of the key shots from the Psycho shower scene. Visual efforts are also taken to replicate Psycho when What Lies Beneath focuses in closely on the gasping breaths, pained expressions and glances of horror that Claire conveys as she confronts both Norman and her impending death. In a sort of reversal, however, the final shots of Marion Crane dead on the bathroom floor in Psycho are revived and undone when Claire, after falling to the bathroom floor herself, begins to regain mobility and eventually drag her mainly lifeless body out of the deadly bathroom.

These stylistic devices are further combined with a typically Hitchcockian attention to detail. As one online reviewer noted, What Lies Beneath "does for bathtubs what Alfred Hitchcock did for showers." The bathtub, which recurs as a site of death and murder throughout the film, seems to have been borrowed directly from the Bates Motel and its function remains quite the same. In both Psycho and What Lies Beneath, the mise-en-scene of the bathroom is a crisp, reflective, cold white and its surroundings are likewise as flat and chilling. The bright, shiny white of the bathtub/shower contrasts distinctly against the inevitably splashed and smeared blood, the constantly flowing water and the skin tones of the dying women. In both films the bathroom scenes are the main site of murder and they take full advantage of finding the female victims in their most vulnerable surroundings.

As Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle says, "When Pfeiffer enters the bathroom of their comfortable lakeside house in Vermont, it’s fair to ask if the ghost she sees there is that of Alfred Hitchcock." Despite being filmed in black and white, Psycho’s expressionistic dark and light contrasts as well as Hitchcock’s general color-coding formulas are put into use in What Lies Beneath. As Stephanie Zacharek says in her Salon review, "Zemeckis takes an almost Hitchcockian amount of care with even his simplest visuals." For most of the film, the people and locations are shot in relatively calm, blue-tone colors. The house on the lake is painted a hazy blue and blends in with the nightly rain, the morning dew or the water of the lake. When murder isn’t imminent, the bathroom’s whiteness is often covered over by a similar but lighter blue layer of mist that signifies a ghostly presence. When the haze is missing from the bathroom and only the white remains, it becomes a sort of warning sign, lacking any other colors and preparing us for the inevitable red bloodshed that will fill its voids. Beyond blood, the color red is generally aligned with danger and with the murdered girl. In the photographs of the young mistress she is always shown wearing red, particularly a red dress. When Claire becomes possessed by the girl’s presence, she likewise dons what seems to be this same red dress which then aligns her even more to the dead girl as well as to the impending danger.

Likewise, What Lies Beneath’s plot progression is closely hinged on a symbolic rose-shaped ornament which pops up repeatedly throughout the film. First the ornament is seen on a key Claire finds, then later on the jewelry box that Claire brings up from the bottom of the lake behind the house and then finally on the necklace worn by the mistress in her photographs. By the end of the film, Claire employs this charm when she confronts Norman about the murder while wearing the same necklace. This type of reappearing signifier is a popular focal point in Hitchcock’s films as well. In Strangers on a Train Guy’s cigarette lighter plays an important role in the narrative as Bruno uses it both for symbolic closeness to Guy as well as potential evidence to pin his murder of Guy’s wife on Guy. In Vertigo, Carlotta’s necklace is the symbolic connection point between Madeleine and Carlotta as well as the piece that fills in the puzzle for Scottie when Judy wears it out with him. In Shadow of a Doubt, young Charlie begins to suspect Uncle Charlie of murder when he gives her a ring engraved with the same initials as a recently murdered widow. In Frenzy Rusk’s tiepin, which is both aligned with the ties that he uses for murder as well as the dead girlfriend whose final grasp of the tiepin takes him on a harrowing ride in a potato truck, also plays a similar role. What Lies Beneath’s intentional use of the classical "Hitchcockian object" further connects it to its Hitchcockian roots.

These objects, often symbols not only of their owner’s but also of their backgrounds, lends to another element of Hitchcockian concern which is also evident in What Lies Beneath. Issues of class, although not completely foregrounded, contribute to the narrative and character buildup of the film. Claire and Norman Spencer come from the upper class, as evidenced by their neatly manicured home, by Norman’s job as a distinguished, award-winning geneticist (following in his father’s noble footsteps), and by Claire’s ability to spend her days leisurely at home rather than working at her own job. Furthermore, just like Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train, Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, Alexander Sebastian in Notorious, and Gavin Elster in Vertigo, Norman Spencer and his evil nature hide beneath a benign, upper-class exterior.

Similarly, Claire, an alumnus of Julliard, is marked as different from the mistress mainly along class lines as well. While Claire spends her days taking pictures of roses for her garden club and attending formal dinner parties with Norman, the slain mistress, Madison, comes from a less regal background. When Claire visits Madison’s home we find that she lived with her mother in a drab, dull house. Madison’s mother, noticeably overweight and excessively fond of cats, reflects this lower class stature as well when she persists to leave soap operas running on the television while Claire asks about the disappearance of her daughter. This same sort of lower class victimization is evident in Vertigo in the Judy character. Judy, like Madison, comes from a lower class background and becomes romantically involved with the married Gavin Elster. Unlike Madeleine, who is always well groomed, Judy wears flashy clothes, covers herself with too much makeup and is shown living in a cheap motel room. By the end, Judy’s value is most clearly undercut by James Stewart’s Scottie character when he plays a callous hand in her eventual death. In Vertigo, Scottie is able to discard of the lower class Judy but not of upper class Madeleine, despite her being dead. Norman Spencer likewise is able to discard of lower class Madison but not of his upper class wife. In both cases, the victim’s less dignified class background seems to validate less spectatorial emotional involvement in the film. When Judy plunges to her death, we are shocked but not as shocked as when Madeleine first did the same. Similarly we are appalled by Norman’s murder of Madison but its is his attempted murder of Claire that beckons our true emotional investment.

Returning to the Rear Window motif, Claire’s initial suspicion of Mr. Fuer seems also to be justified along class lines. Despite living next door to the Spencers, the Fuers are not presented as being as upscale as their neighbors. Although Mr. Fuer appears to work at the same institution as Norman Spencer, his house, appearance and behavior are clearly marked as lower class. The Fuer house is a shabby gray cedar and their garden, in comparison to the Spencers’, is overgrown. As is typical of cars in Hitchcock, the vehicles also play an important role. The Fuers drive older, continuously dirty cars while the Spencers and their friends (even Claire’s psychic friend) sport nicer, newer, cleaner ones. When Claire brings the Fuers a welcome basket, Mr. Fuer is seen slovenly taking the wine while tossing out the basket and roses into the yard. These poor manners are only rivaled by his poorer dress. Repeatedly shown with a heavy beard, a lumbering walk and wearing cheap looking suits, it appears as Mr. Fuer is indeed always trying to hide something. (The name "Fuer" alone, which connotes "Fuher," also seems to validate suspicion.) This lower class neighbor becomes a fair target, as does the neighbor Mr. Thorwald in Rear Window, of suspicions of murder.

In this way and other, how the characters are seen and what that construction of viewpoint means within the narrative ties into the film’s obsession with seeing in general. Like Hitchcock, the occasion of movie-watching and its voyeuristic nature does not escape some level of ironic consideration in What Lies Beneath. As in Rear Window and Rope, both what is seen and what is not seen contributes to the development of the plot and to the buildup of suspense. While the front door opens in anticipation of Claire coming through it and writing appears within the eerie haze of mist on the bathroom mirror, Claire does not see the actual face of her ghost until after her suspicion of Mr. Fuer killing Mrs. Fuer is proved incorrect. Similarly the newspaper clipping detailing Madison’s disappearance remains unseen on the back of an award photo of Norman until the ghost knocks over its frame, forcing Claire to literally uncover an important clue.

Likewise, through purposely constructed angles and shots we, as movie watchers, are shown things that the leading characters do not see. When Claire comes into the house at one point we see her computer suddenly turn on in the reflection of a hallway mirror while she walks by unaware. At another point, as Claire enters her unexpectedly hazy bathroom and looks into the suddenly water-filled bathtub, we briefly see Madison’s reflection in the water although Claire does not. Typically what is shown to us is a reflected image, a duplication of something happening that, for the sake of the characters involved and the development of suspense, remains unseen and unknown to them. In Rope, when the actual rope appears and reappears with consequent narrative tensions in tow, for example, and in Rear Window and other Hitchcock films this same sort of technique is used.

Through these revelations and reflections What Lies Beneath displays a fascination with eyes, the tools for seeing. The only visual difference between Claire and Madison, as Claire notes to her psychiatrist, is their different eye color. When Claire’s lifeless body is slowly covered by water in the bathtub as Norman attempts to drown her, the only part of her body that remains moving and able to communicate is her eyes. The most tense, gripping and suspenseful moment of this drowning scene comes when the water finally comes up and over her eyes.

Water, as seen in the mist, the bathtub and the lake, also plays an important role in the film (as can be expected from the title). Beyond the physical elements of water, much of the film is caught by a camera that "flows like water, always in motion, at least until it is deflected by a mirror or other elusive reflections." Many of the shots are long and fluid (as in the opening of Frenzy or like the continuous shots in Rope, for example) and are only interrupted when an element of reflection, doubling or revelation interjects its movement. We see Claire’s face alongside Madison’s both in the reflection on the water and in the mirror. When Claire is possessed by Madison’s spirit, a deathly-looking version of Claire shows up in the mirror at the door. The water, the reflections shown in it and the fluid camerawork all serve to parallel the characters and their relationships. As the plot thickens, so does the amount of water involved in it. The final climax of the film involves Claire, Norman and Madison all coming together submerged within the depths of the lake.

Finally, it is important to note the Hitchcockian naming conventions that What Lies Beneath employs, particularly with regard to Harrison Ford’s "Norman" character. Norman Spencer seems to be a culmination of various evil-doers in earlier Hitchcock films. The name obviously recalls Norman Bates of Psycho. Like Norman Bates, Norman Spencer has a hidden secret that the film slowly reveals. The full name of Norman Spencer is made up of two first names, reminiscent of Strangers on a Train’s Bruno Anthony and Notorious’s Alexander Sebastian, both of which also lend their character traits to Norman as well. Although well-mannered, well-dressed and seemingly the nice guy, Norman eventually reveals his true colors and then attacks the hero/heroine upon being found out. Similarly, much like Alexander Sebastian dotes on his wife (Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia), Norman Spencer seems to dote on Pfeiffer’s Claire. Eventually, however, both men’s evil nature takes control and Norman, like Alexander, spends the finale of the film trying to do her in.

These naming parallels as well as all the other Hitchcockian traits of What Lies Beneath did not go unnoticed by critics upon the film’s release either. Wesley Morris of the San Francisco Examiner claimed Zemeckis had a "cut-and-paste bonanza with Hitchcock." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said, "the scares are Hitchcock hand-me-downs" while Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "a neo-Hitchcock suspense thriller." Michael Atkinson of the Village Voice, in his unfavorable review said that What Lies Beneath "carries the burden of belated Hitchcockianism" while even Roger Ebert notes that "Zemeckis does quote Hitchcock." As argued above and as Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle seems to agree, the "Zemeckis production keeps percolating in the memory long after all the Hitcockeyed referencing." Although what lies beneath What Lies Beneath is not Hitchcock himself, it seems that the further one plunges into the film the further one becomes engaged not only in the unusual formalism of director Robert Zemeckis but also in his unequivocal inspiration, Alfred Hitchcock.