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

On May 21, 1924, two extremely intelligent university scholars from Chicago, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, executed their highly-calculated plan for the cold-blooded murder of a outside relative of Loeb&960s, 14-year old Bobby Franks. As students of Nietzsche&960s philosophy, Loeb and Leopold had set out to endue the &8805perfect murder&8804 in order to actualize the belief that they were of an selected group, superior to the common man, to whom the standard moral code did not apply. So infamous is the grade of their murder and eventual detainment that it has become entrenched in American popular culture, with numerous books and films aspiring to recreate it in natural detail. Amongst these, Alfred Hitchcock&960s Rope (1948) stands out as an exemplary achievement both(prenominal) in its cinematic technique as well as its guardedly executed plot, which exposes the psychological decomposition of the two murderers as their deed is little by little discovered. How ever, the aspect of the real case that is not explicitly addressed in the film as a result of the censorship codes at the time, entirely one of the primary 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 change dynamic between their aggression and, more fundamentally, their frustrated homosexual desires which explains the wrong of their actions. Strewn throughout Rope are many indications that underlying the ostensible story of a murder are unfulfilled homosexual desires of such an intensiveness 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 sack is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that practiced disorders will ensue&8804 (742). Because society prevented them from gratifying their erotic in stincts, the boys had to find separate means 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. Peter Gay. immature 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, fanny Dall. Videocassette. Warner Brothers & Transatlantic Pictures, 1948.