When audiences first watched a crazed Norman Bates rip open the shower curtains and incessantly stab a nude Janet Leigh to a myriad of chilling stringed screeches, many deserted their seats and stormed out of the cinema. The film was of course Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 landmark horror flick Psycho, and it remains one of his most acclaimed works of cinema. But what was it that horrified audiences so wretchedly? There is no visible nudity – rigorous censorship made sure of that – and we never see the knife touch, let alone penetrate, a single shred of skin. In fact, when one watches the film now it seems incredibly tame. So why did audiences feel so uncomfortable? It’s a simple but revealing explanation. Hitchcock forced them into a position in which they simply did not want to be – the position of voyeur.

As far back as ancient Greek tragedies, it was customary for horrific or violent deeds to take place “offstage”. Indeed, Roman poet Horace quipped in his Ars Poetica that although “the mind is less actively stimulated by what it takes through the ear than by what is presented to it through the trustworthy agency of the eyes”, gruesome acts such as Medea butchering her children or Atreus cooking his dish of human flesh should never take place “within public view”. It was a rejection of scopophilia, but a simultaneous acknowledgement of its power. There was something undignified and gratuitous about attempting to display violence right in front of the audience’s eyes. Not only were they unlikely to show it particularly effectively, but it was also not what the audience had come to see. As a voyeur, audiences somehow feel complicit in the events onscreen. With Pyscho’s infamous shower scene, Hitchcock thrust his audience into directly witnessing something that may just as well have taken place off-screen, or through a silhouette or some other suggestive technique. The audience are instead rendered as helpless and tragically vulnerable as poor Marion Crane herself: stripped down, holding up their hands in protest, screaming in vain.

Hitchcock pioneered a camera that represented the eye of the audience. Rather than watching all the action from a distance, like a play, the audience are granted their own position within the action itself. They are a character, in many ways. In particular, Hitchcock’s cameras often work as an individual’s point of view. In Vertigo (1958), for example, we experience Scottie’s acrophobia firsthand when the camera meanders and distorts via the dolly-zoom when at a great height. In Rear Window (1954), our vision is eclipsed by florescent bright flashes signifying the temporary blindness caused by the flashbulbs to Thorwald. It also allows us to pick up on things that other characters do not notice, such as when it zooms slowly in on Marion’s wad of stolen money in the motel room whilst Norman attempts to clean up the crime scene in Psycho. It is only natural that this special point of view acquired by the audience comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, liberties and limits. The boundaries are blurred between diegetic and non-diegetic audience involvement. The audience, as a voyeur, must take care with what they “choose” to see.

There is a prevailing obsession with voyeurism running throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre. He knew that human beings have a fascination with watching. We are naturally nosy, curious, intrusive in our daily existence. This is demonstrated no better than through James Stewart’s protagonist in Rear Window. Finding himself crippled and bored, a man resorts to spying on his neighbours with a pair of trusted binoculars and the zoom of his camera, spinning a web of speculations and accusations from what he takes in through his subjective eyes. It’s also worth noting that the man is a photographer – he literally makes his living from observing with his eager lens. The opening passage of Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin comes to mind, when the meta-narrator declares, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Hitchcock confines his audiences to a similar disposition. We are able to look, but not touch. From the safety of our seats, we watch the narrative unfold, except there is one key difference between Hitchcock’s audience and Isherwood’s narrator – Hitchcock wants us to think. As L.B. Jefferies watches his neighbours, he cannot help but make judgements and conclusions about their lives. Hitchcock knows that his audience will inevitably be forced to do the same.

But Hitchcock also knew of the darker side of voyeurism. Jefferies does, after all, become dangerously swept up in the illicit affairs of his neighbour through his scopophilia. This voyeuristic prospect is so compelling that it was adapted 50 years later into a loose remake called Disturbia (2007) with Shia LaBeouf. Norman Bates too exercises his own fetishisation of voyeurism to disastrous results. Before Marion Crane enters the shower, Norman removes a painting from the wall to reveal a peephole, through which he watches her undress. This is creepy to say the least, and Gus Van Sant in his 1998 remake capitalised on this creepiness to the full, having Norman masturbate as he peers at Marion’s body. Hitchcock plays too with his characters’ awareness of their own entrapment in a voyeuristic society. What is paranoia, after all, if not the fear of being watched, of being scrutinized, manipulated, and laughed at? Paranoia in film is a blacked out window – the fourth wall between character and audience. The characters are the victims, the audience are the watchers. North by Northwest (1959) is a prime example of this. Just as Roger Thornhill cannot see the sadistic pilot of the crop duster in the infamous scene in the cornfield, Hitchcock’s characters are often overwrought with a sense of being personally victimised and spied upon by unseen forces. More often than not, these forces turn out to be us, the audience.

What Hitchcock’s voyeurism established was a camera that never leaves its subjects alone – a camera that never hides behind bushes or pans to euphemistic shots of the ocean during lovemaking – a camera not afraid to show the audience exactly what is happening. As well as granting the audience a new role in the watching of cinema, he also opened the floodgates for what could be shown on screen, being somewhat bold and liberal with his prevailing themes of sex and violence. Of course, Hitchcock worked in a world far more heavily dominated by censorship than the cinema of today, but his influence has been invaluable. When Sharon Stone slowly opened her legs in Basic Instinct (1992), revealing her – erm – lack of underwear, she created one of the most infamously erotic scenes of modern cinema. The camera does not shy away from Miss Stone’s vulva; instead, we see exactly what the detectives in the room see, and thus we are just as shocked and uncomfortable as they are.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman undoubtedly owes its innovative “eternal” camera techniques to Mr. Hitchcock as well. The camera (and thus the audience) become a inquisitive and curious backstage presence, following the action wherever it leads. Birdman is an example of pure cinematic voyeurism – the camera literally cannot stop watching people for a single moment. It is even scared to blink. We see his influence in the point of view shots of Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), and even the eponymous shark’s beady perspective in Jaws (1975).

Moreover, we must ask if a film as “racy” and explicit as Fifty Shades of Grey could have ever been made without Hitchcock’s audacious smashing down of the barrier between the eyes of the audience and the eye of the camera. There is practically nothing in modern cinema that would now be deemed “unshowable”. The audience – as voyeurs – are trusted with the all-seeing camera lens. To attempt to allude or to hide things from the audience is to patronise them and to be untruthful to the events of the film. It isn’t about showing nudity or violence gratuitously, it’s about trusting the audience with the nature of the material and – moreover – indulging the inherently human fascination with watching other people’s lives, and for that we must unreservedly thank Mr Hitchcock.

I did nothing for Mother’s day this year, just like every year. Most likely you did nothing too. So I’ve concocted a mother’s day tribute list, although like the itinerant son I am, I’ve done it a bit late. Here are the 6 songs you can use to show your mum that now you’ve gone to university and got a bit cool, you don’t need her anymore.

 “What’s that mum? Oh yeah I’d love a cup of tea. Cheers”

 1. I Really Like You – Carly Rae Jepsen

Watch your mum shudder at the abrasive, candy-coated brilliance of this absolute banger. Play it repeatedly. Refer to it as an ‘absolute banger’ repeatedly. Don’t explain what ‘banger’ means. “What’s that? No mum, it’s nothing like ‘Get Lucky’. Yes, I know you liked Get Lucky. No, we can’t have Get Lucky.”

2. Hey Darling – Sleater Kinney

Don’t let the fact that this is basically just a bit of high quality AM rock stop you from intimidating your mum. Even if your mum’s a feminist, there’s no way she’s a proper feminist, like Sleater Kinney are. Talk to her about intersectionality. Talk to her Cuntry Living, and emphasise the pun. You are now more political than she ever was, and you’ve read the blogs to prove it. Let her know.

3. The Blacker the Berry – Kendrick Lamar

‘Hold on Mum – you’re not a racist, are you?’

5. All Day – Kanye West

“Kanye West is, unquestionably the greatest musician of the 21^st century”. You don’t have to believe it; you just have to say it. It’s important that your mum knows she no longer has a say in popular taste. This is your world, she’s just living in it.

6. Never Forget – Take That

Let her have this one. Here’s why: you know that job you’re going to get when you graduate? Well, the thing is, you’re not going to get it. Because graduate jobs are about as real as the big cats your Uncle Stew claims live out on the moor. So you’ll either be doing a masters, weeping into your books and listening to the Take That record you actually liked all along, or more likely, you’re moving back in, and listening to it with your mum. Just like you did before you ‘got all Oxford’.

Sorry mate. 

How it feels to not be able to communicate is a hard thing to communicate, but Ian McEwan has made a career out of doing so. His plots sprint off from where his characters’ conversations stumble into misunderstanding. Partially, these misunderstandings are the result of the particular kind of Englishness his characters generally possess; it is the kind of Englishness which takes its dog for a walk after finding its wife has been unfaithful, the kind which screws up the love letters it has been writing all afternoon. The first sentence of his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach illustrates this superbly: ‘They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.’ Yet McEwan’s characters are also unable to speak their minds because they do not know their minds, nor their hearts; only McEwan, with his shrewd Freudian eye, and his pen tracing their most repressed thoughts, knows what really motivates them. Even the tightest lid will let off steam, and no matter how emotionally hunched up these characters are they never succeed in battening down their unconscious urges for long. Reading McEwan’s best books we vaguely forebode the character’s coming crisis, but cannot predict what form it will take; we are surprised by how it happens, not by its happening.

Unfortunately his latest book, The Children Act, is not one of those books. It is a slim novel, standing on its tip toes so as not to be categorized as a novella, which concerns a few months in the life of Fiona Maye, a high court judge whose husband leaves her for a younger (and, it quickly turns out, uninterested) woman, and whose professional life swamps her private life with a series of morally perplexing court cases. The plot begins just as Fiona’s husband tells her he wants to have an affair, but from here it expands chronologically in both directions, digressing to a court case several weeks past concerning two Jewish children whose father wants to shield them from a modern education, and progressing forwards towards a case to give a grievously ill Jehova’s Witness a blood transfusion, against his parents’ wishes.

‘Digressing’ might seem a needlessly negative word, but the way in which the plot wades into Fiona’s past makes it unwieldy. McEwan ballasts every halting progression in time with pages and pages of flashback-exposition. This is irritating, especially as McEwan has previously shown how supplely and economically he can convey the conditions which formed his characters’ personality. When reading his 1990 novel The Innocent we learn how sheltered the main character’s life has been so far from the first wry sentence in which he is mentioned: ‘Leonard Marnham, an employee of the Post Office, had never actually met an American to talk to, but he had studied them in depth at his local Odeon.’ In The Children Act, McEwan is rarely so tersely brilliant, because he does not trust the reader to be so discerning.

Every novel has a hypothetical implied reader – the kind of reader who is just discerning enough to understand why the author has written what is written and not otherwise. The implied reader of Finnegan’s Wake is an anal-retentive genius with an attention span of twenty years and an encyclopedic knowledge of a dozen languages and three thousand years of literature. He is, in other words, James Joyce himself. The implied reader of The Children Act, by comparison, is a humble figure. In fact, he’s a bit dim. He needs things to be explained to him, all of the time. Which is good, because that’s exactly what McEwan’s narrator does – all of the time.

So often, when his character’s feelings are made perfectly clear by what they say and how they act, he burdens his prose with unnecessary explication. ‘I’m not the one about to wreck our marriage’, Fiona retorts to her husband’s attempt to shift the blame, to which he responds ‘so you say.’ That this is an attempt to exploit her insecurities is needless to say– but McEwan does say so, at length. Her husband, he writes, ‘said it reasonably, projecting the three words deep into the cave of her self-doubt, shaping them to her inclination to believe that in any conflict as embarrassing as this, she was likely to be wrong.’ This tells us nothing that hasn’t already been implied, and the metaphor of the cave is ill chosen. McEwan uses it because caves are generally empty. But Fiona’s self-doubts are not cave-like, they are not a vessel to be filled; they themselves fill her mind to the point of overflowing. In fact, the story itself progresses through their overflow into her public life. This passage is not a one off –McEwan’s narrator is always barging in on the tenderest of scenes, third-wheeling on lovers and mourners, with his impromptu lectures and his cack-handed metaphors.

McEwan also seems to be under the impression that we are unable to remember what he wrote five pages ago. This is no exaggeration: on page 140 he tells us ‘Teenage visits to her Newcastle cousins had been her only adventures’, then on page 145, ‘She had a history with Newcastle and felt at ease here. In her teens she had come several times.’ I imagine any goldfish who happen to pick up The Children Act will find this kind of repetition helpful. But humans are likely to find it annoying.

Yet in its favour, Children Act does present us with a set of characters who are imaginably human. This has always been McEwan’s forte, and his ability to do so shows no sign of waning. The only caveat I would place on this judgement is that Fiona seems too conveniently able to articulate her feelings; this too is a way in which McEwan mollycoddles the reader. The plot of The Children Act advances in such a way as to make Fiona, and by extension the reader, question the supremacy of her atheistic belief system above other such systems. In real life, we do a great deal of our thinking about such questions as this without realising we are doing so. Changing one’s religious or political beliefs is not something which happens in an instant. About these matters there are no Demascene moments; there are only moments when we realise we have already changed our minds. This is especially true of people who, like Fiona, would rather not have to bother thinking about such humongous questions, who would rather their lives were not complicated by their own emotions. At the bedside of the ill, devout, and portentously named Adam, Fiona realises that ‘Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another’. This realisation is too unanticipated to be believable, which is especially a shame because, as mentioned earlier, McEwan has previously done a brilliant job of making developments in his characters both surprising and concordant with their pasts. Here McEwan obviously intends to express Fiona’s own feelings through the third person, rather than the thoughts of some distant, omniscient narrator, but these same feelings are so neatly and articulately expressed that they read as if they were the narrator’s. Such moments break our suspension of disbelief, and remind us that she is, in fact, just a fictional construct.

I finished The Children Act asking the question no author ever wants their readers to ask: is this bad novel just a blip, or does it represent a more general decline in its writer’s artistic powers? I don’t know, but the irritating aspects of this book are not new to McEwan’s work. His nannyish attitude towards the reader, his need to calibrate the entire plot towards the conveyance of an ideological point, and deleterious effect of these faults on his characterisations, have been present in his writing at least since 2007’s On Chesil Beach. McEwan has much affection for the reader but less respect. For this reason, The Children Act is not likely to inspire the reader with much respect for him, either.