El vértigo de las identidades: secretos y personalidades falsas en el cine de Hitchcock

Abstract

The intertwining of secret and personal identity features prominently in Alfred Hitchcock's cinema. Its plots are full of people falsely accused, mistaken identities, characters with a hidden past, double agents, blackmailers, impostors, split personalities, etc. In these movies nobody is what it seems, everybody has something to hide. Identity is the sum of all the masks, such seems to be one of the messages: we also are what we conceal. Building on the theoretical frame developed by Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Umberto Eco and others scholars, we intend to show from a novel approach that Hitchcok's filmography can be seen as a thorough investigation of the many interactions stimulated by secrecy, both in the public (secret of State) and private level (personal secrets, family secrets). Additionally, our analysis brings into light one of the main leitmotiv underlying those interactions: the malleability of identity, the source of its destabilization. The enactment of its ambiguities and paradoxes provides useful guidance to the sociologist for interpreting phenomena in the making, as fake identities, identity thefts and the relationships between offline and online identities.