A new view of the master's oeuvre, focusing on his ambivalence toward the Emersonian way of thinking he longed to embrace but resisted for the sake of his art.

William Rothman argues that the driving force of Hitchcock's work was his struggle to reconcile the dark vision of his favorite Oscar Wilde quote, "Each man kills the thing he loves," with the quintessentially American philosophy, articulated in Emerson's writings, that gave classical Hollywood movies of the New Deal era their extraordinary combination of popularity and artistic seriousness.