Conclusion: Violent Endings with a Twist
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Published:February 2015
Following an analysis of the role of violence in Hitchcock’s work, the chapter segues to the franchise’s most famous teleplay, “Lamb to the Slaughter,” a story pivoted on a murder carried out by a woman as an extension of her role as housewife and ending with the detectives eating the titled murder weapon. This inspires a discussion of some aspects of women’s place in Hitchcock’s story work. Mother and daughter characters and their sometimes fraught relations put his role gallery in dialogue with key postwar debates, particularly Philip Wylie’s diatribe against “momism.” The study ends with the “leftovers” from Hitchcock’s television—that is, the trappings that came to define his public persona as extracted from his role as host. These leftovers offered the mise-en-scène for a press luncheon at the Universal lot when the production of Family Plot commenced, a decade after the demise of Hitchcock’s television.
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