Of Nieces and Uncles: the Gendered Evolution of Suspicion in Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) and Stoker (Park Chan-wook, 2013)

Abstract

In Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), young Charlie’s initial faith in her Uncle Charlie gradually dissolves, and leads her to a bitter realization of life’s baseness. Seventy years later, using Hitchcock’s film as a reference, director Park Chan-wook totally transforms the relationship between his own Uncle Charlie and Charlie’s niece, India, in Stoker (Park Chan-wook, 2013). The complex connection between the two characters is first characterized by India’s suspicious mind, but her trouble with Charlie enables the niece to outdo her kin in evil deeds, thereby giving Park Chan-wook’s film a gendered twist in which the woman is no longer the hunted, but the stalker. Using Paul Ricœur’s ideas on the benefits of suspicion, this article first analyzes how suspicion is used in both films not only to question and dissolve family links, but also to propose a social structure in which the main female character is happy to fit. However, the dynamics of suspicion is different, even opposed, in the two films. While Shadow of a doubt seems to foreground a belief in patriarchy, Stoker highlights a radical and death-dealing subversion of patriarchal rules.