The gaze, one of the most powerful tools in cinema, takes on a new meaning in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) as it is not only skillfully utilized, but challenged and reversed. From the very beginning, Hitchcock uses the gaze to symbolize absence, a paradox that is the foundation of the entire film. The second scene in the movie shows the sea at first. Then, the camera gradually makes its way to Maxim, who is standing at the precipice of a cliff overlooking the water. Maxim is gazing at the sea, the absence of Rebecca, which in turn, represents the absence of his ability to assert his masculinity and be “whole.” At the same time, Maxim’s intense look at the sea gives the initial impression that he is about to commit suicide. This is an example of how the gaze can signify the attempt to exert control over women, and can bring weight to death and murder as well.


The gaze is not only employed in the “traditional” sense in this beginning scene—it is in fact reversed. As Tania Modelski noted in “Woman and the Labyrinth: Rebecca,” this initial gaze is the reversal of the conventional gaze, where the object of the gaze is shown first and the spectator is inferred. In Rebecca’s case, the spectator (Maxim) is shown first, and the inferred object is not seen (and never will be). The gaze may be reversed in a broader context as well. As Modelski points out, Rebecca is proposed to be all-seeing. (For example, Mrs. Danvers asks the second Mrs. de Winter if she believes the dead come back to watch the living.) If this is so, this means Rebecca may have the most powerful “look” of anyone, man or woman. This perversion of the gaze—where the inferred object actually holds the gaze throughout the film—perhaps makes sense, since the bearer of the gaze is, in reality, never seen, but still an active force that directs the movement of the film. And one may go further and say that this is perhaps another example of Rebecca’s plurality throughout the entire film: she is both the inferred object of the gaze and the bearer of the gaze.