Sexual Frustration in Alfred Hitchcocks Rope Essay -- Rope Film Analys

On may 21, 1924, both highly intelligent university scholars from Chicago, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, executed their highly-calculated plan for the cold-blooded dispatch of a distant relative of Loeb&960s, 14-year old Bobby Franks. As students of Nietzsche&960s philosophy, Loeb and Leopold had rate out to commit the &8805perfect murder&8804 in order to create the belief that they were of an elite group, superior to the common man, to whom the standard moral legislation did not apply. So infamous is the story of their murder and eventual detainment that it has find entrenched in American popular culture, with numerous books and films aspiring to delight it in vivid detail. Amongst these, Alfred Hitchcock&960s Rope (1948) stands out as an symbolical achievement both in its cinematic technique as tumefy as its carefully executed plot, which exposes the psychological decomposition of the two murderers as their deed is gradually discovered. However, the aspect of the real case that is not explicitly addressed in the film as a result of the security review codes at the time, but one of the primary reasons that Hitchcock was initially attracted to the project, is the sapphicity of the two young men, a factor which becomes pivotal to a Freudian rendition of the film. It is the shifting and complicated dynamic between their aggression and, more fundamentally, their forestall homosexual desires which explains the depravity of their actions. Strewn throughout Rope are many indications that underlying the ostensible story of a murder are unfulfilled homosexual desires of such an intensity that the dialogue and actions of Brandon and Phillip, the names of the two murderers in the film, by chance ... ...oing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue&8804 (742). Because society prevented them from gratifying their tickling instincts, the boys had to fin d other means of maintaining their psychic equilibrium, which, in their case, brought with it only fatal results. ReferencesFreud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its Discontents. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.Linder, Douglas O. &8805The Leopold and Loeb Trial A Brief Account.&8804 Famous American Trials. 1997. November 2, 2004. Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perfs. James Stewart, Rupert Cadell, John Dall. Videocassette. Warner Brothers & Transatlantic Pictures, 1948.