When we speak of [Hitchcock's] camera, of course, we are speaking of an amalgam of director and audience: the director's eye and the eye of the beholder welded into a single screen image. The nosy, rubbernecking camera of the opening montage of Frenzy is an admission from Hitchcock that he is a thrill-seeker at heart (his is the most prominent of the gaping faces on the screen) and a reminder to his movie audience that they are no better: a serio-comic blending of 'I confess' and 'J'accuse'. It is fair warning of what is to follow: not only further titillations of the peek-a-boo variety but constant reminders of the voyeuristic impulses which are all too willingly being aroused within us by the Master of Prurient Suspense, the patron saint of Peeping Toms and moviegoers. (p. 134)

Much of the vitality of Frenzy results from this implied relationship between director and audience. Hitchcock plays with our anticipations, showing us sometimes too little, sometimes too much of what we expect to see, but in every case drawing our somewhat ruffled attention to the expectations themselves….

What distinguishes Hitchcock's films from others which serve the audience in the same way is that Hitchcock is aware of the secret gratifications moviegoing affords and incorporates this awareness into the forms themselves of his films. (p. 135)

If we are to verbalise the 'meaning' of Frenzy we must look to the politics of cinema, to the mutual dependences of filmmakers and filmgoers for our vocabulary, for this is what Frenzy is 'about'. To pursue other trails will lead us to dead ends. To be sure, the film is filled with the familiar signposts of Freudian sexuality: dominating women, mother complexes, diagnoses of impotence as well as frigidity, high-flown talk of the 'pleasure principle' and the 'connection between religious and sexual mania', and so on….

This is not to say that one should pay no attention to these signposts, but that one should not force oneself to pay attention to them, forgetting that the pleasure of the journey is itself the goal of a Hitchcock film…. If Frenzy is about sexual mania it has precious little to say about it, if these old chestnuts are the sum total of its insights.

The fact is that Hitchcock's films have never been rewarding on the 'theme and structure' level. The usual avenues of interpretation—the development of plot and character to express theme—are closed in Hitchcock's case. His films have structure, but not theme; form, but not 'meaning'. Hitchcock has a great deal to show to his audiences, but nothing to say. This fact has occasioned many critical difficulties, and two familiar errors. On the one hand are those who think that since Hitchcock's films have nothing to say, he is not a major artist, while on the other are those who think that since Hitchcock is a major artist, his films must be saying something. (p. 136)

Frenzy is not about a sex killer; it's about looking at a sex killer. Its manner is its matter.

This is not merely the inevitable distinction between film and other art forms, such as literature. There are some directors whose films can be discussed in terms of characters as well as actors, plot developments as well as camera movements, symbolism and themes instead of the immediate effect on the audience, but Hitchcock isn't one of them…. Hitchcock is thoroughly a Movie Man, a Cinematiser. The materials out of which his films are wrought are those of movie-making and movie-going.

Hitchcock's heroes, for example, are characteristically handsome, innocent, vacant, constantly forced to run about for reasons they can't fathom, ignorant of the large design in which they figure, totally unaware of the forces which are controlling their behaviour: they are like actors. Hitchcock's villains are more suave than handsome, dignified, urbane, unruffled, never forced to run about, not at all naïve, totally aware of what's going on and in fact in perfect control of the actions of the others: they are like directors. Hitchcock's camera does not record subjects: it creates them. How the camera looks, from what angle and for how long, how it turns away or lingers, how it moves or stays still, in so far as this determines what ends up on the screen, and therefore in the mind of the audience, is itself the subject.

Perhaps it would be clearer to say that the real subject of Hitchcock's films is the fluctuating rhythm of the middle-class imagination, the picture-making power inside the mind of each member of his audience, to which his camera approximates. Hitchcock's films are the concretised naughtiness of the imagination, which refuses to dwell on the images which Reason dictates as the soundest, best, and in closest correspondence with reality, but which summons up irrational images (as Don Quixote did) because they are more fun. His films cinematise that part of all of us which prefers hell to heaven. His is a cinema 'governed purely by the pleasure principle', to quote one of Frenzy's characters. But it is also a cinema which incorporates an awareness of what it is doing into the doing itself: it transforms our imaginations into just the parade of images we want privately to see, but always with the humorous detachment of one who is on to our little secrets….

If Frenzy resists interpretation except in these terms (which are, to a large extent, the familiar ones of French and American auteur critics), it is because Hitchcock's films have nothing to do with our cognitive life. They have their source and inspiration in the imaginative life, and it is to the imagination that they return. (p. 137)