Strangers on a Train

Abstract

From its earliest flickerings, Hitchcock’s cinema located the dynamics among cultural production, exhibition, distribution, and reception in the literal terrain of modernity. Circulating through cinemas, nightclubs, music halls, newsrooms, printing presses, radio broadcast booths, amusement parks, and neon sign-punctuated cityscapes, his plots trace the multivalent tensions between gazers and spectacle animated by mechanisms, venues, sights, and figures of mass culture and urban display. Among the many Hitchcock works that transform spaces of collective consumption into loci of acute anxiety, the film that focuses most pointedly on the menaces of modern spectatorship is Strangers on a Train. This 1951 work of perpetual transit among sites of attraction constitutes an incessantly unsettling meditation on the perilous dialectics between contemporary stardom and fan culture.