I

THE GATE

The film begins with a trespass, and the trespasser is the camera.

An iron gate, chained and padlocked. A drive beyond it, choked. A voice — a woman’s, unhurried, speaking in the past tense of a dream. And then the impossible thing: the camera does not stop at the gate. It does not go around, or under, or wait for the lock to yield. It passes through the bars, as though iron were a rumour, and proceeds up the drive at the pace of something that has all the time in the world because it has already lost its own.

Nothing in the story has happened yet. No character has appeared. And already the film has broken a law of physics and, in breaking it, has told us what kind of entity is narrating. Whatever is conducting us up this drive has no shoulders. It cannot be barred. It goes where the living may not go, and it goes there at will, and it is looking for a house.

This is not a flourish. It is a definition. For the next two hours the film will be preoccupied with a woman who is everywhere and nowhere, who is refused nothing, who enters rooms without opening doors, who is dead and undiminished. The camera has just performed her. Before Rebecca de Winter is named, before she is described, before a single character has trembled at the thought of her, the apparatus has already demonstrated her mode of being: unlimited access, no body. The film does not need a ghost. It has a lens.

Consider what else this opening does. It shows us the ruin first. Manderley appears at the end of the drive as a shell, moonlit, roofless, silent, with the moon shifting behind cloud so that the light on the stone arrives and withdraws like breathing. We are given the conclusion in the first minute — the house burns; the house is gone — and only then are we permitted to meet the woman who will spend the entire film trying to become its mistress. Everything she wants, we have already seen reduced to masonry and weed. Every ambition she forms, every humiliation she absorbs in the hope of one day belonging here, is staged inside a future we have already toured.

Suspense, in the vulgar sense, requires ignorance. This film opens by abolishing it, and is more anxious for the abolition. What we do not know is not whether but how — and, more disquietingly, at whose hands, and at what cost, and whether the loss will be survivable. Hitchcock’s most durable insight is that knowledge is the raw material of dread rather than its antidote. To know that a house will burn is to watch every candle in it.

Then there is the voice. It belongs to a woman who never gives her name — not here, not in the two hours that follow, not in the last frame. She narrates in retrospect, which means she has survived; she narrates in the language of dream, which means she cannot be entirely trusted; and she narrates without identifying herself, which means the film’s first-person authority issues from a vacancy. The title of the film is another woman’s name. The teller of the film has no name at all. Between those two facts the entire work is suspended.

Notice, too, what the dream permits. A dream is not a lie and not a document. It is memory with the furniture rearranged, and it grants the film a permission it will use repeatedly: to render a place more accurately than a place can be rendered. Manderley in this prologue is not an estate. It is what an estate looks like when it has been thought about for years by someone who was frightened there. The drive is too long. The vegetation is not merely overgrown but predatory — the film’s language for a civilisation that maintains itself only by continuous effort and dissolves the moment attention lapses. Order here is not natural. It is staffed. Remove the staff, the mistress, the money, the ritual of dressing for dinner, and the woods walk back in within a season.

And the sea. Before the story proper begins, the image dissolves from ruin to water, and water to rock, and rock to a man standing at the edge of a cliff in daylight. The film has moved from the end to the beginning by way of the sea, which is where the truth is kept. It will keep it for the better part of the film. When it gives it up, everything changes.

One last observation about this first minute, because it establishes an ethic that governs the whole. The camera moves toward the house continuously — a single sustained approach, with the dissolves stitched so that motion never stops. It does not cut to the house. It arrives at the house. In a film obsessed with intrusion, with the crossing of thresholds one is not entitled to cross, the opening gesture is a slow, unstoppable entry into a property that belongs to someone else. That will be the heroine’s entire experience of marriage. It is also, incidentally, a description of what an audience does. We too have passed through the gate. We too are here without invitation, looking at the private rooms of people we have ...