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

On May 21, 1924, two highly intelligent university scholars from Chicago, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, executed their highly-calculated plan for the moth-eaten murder of a distant relative of Loeb&960s, 14-year old Bobby Franks. As students of Nietzsche&960s philosophy, Loeb and Leopold had set 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 code did not apply. So infamous is the story of their murder and eventual detainment that it has become fasten in American popular culture, with numerous books and films aspiring to recreate it in vivid detail. Amongst these, Alfred Hitchcock&960s Rope (1948) stands out as an exemplary achievement twain in its cinematic technique as well as its carefully executed plot, which exposes the psychological decomposition of the two murderers as their deed is gradually discovered. However, the persuasion of the real case that is not explicitly addressed in the film as a result of the censorship codes at the time, but one of the primitive reasons that Hitchcock was initially attracted to the project, is the homosexuality of the two young men, a factor which becomes pivotal to a Freudian interpretation of the film. It is the shifting and complicated dynamic between their onslaught and, more fundamentally, their frustrated 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, unintentionally ... ...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 erotic instincts, the boys had to find other mea ns of maintaining their psychic equilibrium, which, in their case, brought with it only deadly results. ReferencesFreud, Sigmund. Civilizations and Its Discontents. The Freud Reader. Ed. tool 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.