The clockwork universe explained in natural theology and popularized by Newton is thus introduced in a subtle albeit significant manner. He displays it proudly and comments on it. Newton receives a wristwatch as a present. The Newton family members–clearly intelligent, moral people–observe the conventions of orderliness and timeliness it is fitting that Mr. Isaac Newton, known for reconciling some of the polyvalent religious and scientific frictions raging among late seventeenth-century intelligentsia, explained the universal order in clear, rational, and understandable principles. If the universe is orderly, then an orderly entity created it. If time is ordered then the universe is orderly. Such a cosmology rests squarely on the divine clock-maker presupposition: if one finds a watch, it must be concluded that a clock-maker made it. The Newton family happens to share their surname with Sir Isaac Newton, the famed Christian scientist and the progenitor of natural theology. The patriarch, Joseph, is located in the center of this familial universe. The film’s minor obsession with clocks can be partially explained by looking at the premise that Christian cosmology of time and order has been transcribed into secular time. In it, timeliness and lateness reflect the ideological presuppositions of their creator, Alfred Hitchcock.
Perhaps nowhere in Hitchcock’s work is this principle more poignant than in Shadow of a Doubt. Often, it is causally associated with the threat of death and destruction. It represents a supreme transgression against the cosmological presumption. Consequently, lateness represents more than just a faux pas.
They represent the maintenance of moral order, synonymous with cosmic order. Saving time and keeping time therefore represent more than just observing a social nicety. In his corpus, such notions are manifested by the symbolic role of time. (This article, my contribution to the 4th Annual Alfred Hitchcock Blogathon, is excerpted and adapted from a chapter of my full-length book found here: )Īs a life-long Christian, Alfred Hitchcock’s moral universe is predicated on an orderly system, human responsibility, the possibility for redemption, reinforcing faith with good works, and inherited guilt.
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