In his newly re-printed book, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Jacobs expands on this insight. The volume, based on a 2007 exhibition of the same name, unpacks the architectural imagery of several Hitchcock titles, spanning his early American works like Rebecca and Suspicion on through to the later Hollywood blockbusters of Vertigo and The Birds. It does so, on the one hand, through exegesis, whereby Jacobs calls on figures like Walter Benjamin and Gaston Bachelard, not to mention a supporting cast of Hitchcock scholars, to substantiate his readings of the films. On the other, and more to the claims of the book—positioning the filmmaker as a kind of "non-architect," a term both accurate and not—Jacobs produces floor plan drawings that recreate several of Hitchcock’s most memorable studio sets.
The drawings are “reconstructions of spaces that never existed,” Jacobs says, and as such, they don’t always make sense architecturally. Sets like Manderlay, the mansion in Rebecca, are plagued by inconsistencies, many of which are nonetheless impossible to spot on the screen. Superfluous sectional changes and baroque nooks are introduced to accommodate the sweep of the camera or, in many cases, a single camera position. Even when the sets are consistent, their design reveals the hand of a particularly inept architect. The plan for the Bates house in Psycho, for instance, gives you an idea about how oppressively small Norman’s bedroom is. Similarly, the rooms in the adjacent motel aren’t laid out in an efficient manner, with the bathtub in Room 1 invading the neighbor’s living room.
Yet, while they may falter on paper, the plans reveal more ambitious concerns. In Pyscho, the sets' composition embody physical Norman’s split, fractured personality in a way that's not immediately apparent, but gradually made clear. Citing Slavoj Žižek, Jacobs points to the “schizoid architecture” found on the Bates’s property and how the buildings are spatially related to each other. The imposing, but crumbling house on the hill is juxtaposed against the rectilinear geometry of the motel strip. Norman’s frail mental state is a direct result of “his inability to locate himself between the anonymous modernist box of the motel and his mother’s Gothic house.” Or to quote Godard once more, here, between these two architectural extremes, lies “the tangible terrain of one’s uneasiness.”