Audience Role

Though suspense was the dominant exchange between film and viewer, close readings show us that
audiences of Hitchcock movies aren’t treated only as recipients of emotion and dread. The auteur
director brings us as far into the story as possible, so that we not only see, but can almost become.
These three films offer escapades as different sorts of spies, investigators if you will, of mind, murder,
the smallest thing that the near-endlessness of being an invalid allows one to see, and people most of
all. Some characters earn a considerable amount of our empathy and concern as we follow them as their
confidant, their Jiminy Cricket, their fellow skeptic elder or love-struck youth, or simply look upon them,
wondering what they have in store.