Wake Up, Charlie.
Use Your Wits.

He can no longer control what Charlie knows, so he tries to control what knowledge means.

The tavern conversation begins with an asymmetry Uncle Charlie cannot admit. Charlie has already read the article, followed the ring back toward its owner, and identified the family visitor with the public story of the Merry Widow Murderer. She enters wounded by knowledge but not epistemically defeated. He enters on the defensive from the outset—as the man whose secrecy has failed. The supposed teacher is already speaking from a position of exposure.

His response is to enlarge the argument until the particulars of his conduct seem provincial. “Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something!” he commands (SD). The imperative sounds pedagogical, almost generous. In fact, it is an attempted seizure of Charlie’s awakening. If he cannot make her unknow what she knows, he can still try to persuade her that her discovery proves his philosophy rather than his guilt.

The irony is severe because Charlie has already done exactly what he commands: she has used her wits, precisely. She has tested his reaction, reconstructed a destroyed source, compared independent signs, and accepted a conclusion capable of demolishing the ideal ego around which she had organized her revolt against ordinary life. Uncle Charlie offers no comparable labor of inquiry. He begins with disgust and promotes it to ontology. What he calls awakening is another form of sleep—the torpor of the nihilist who has given up on the realm of the possible.

The change of venue sharpens the reversal. Charlie obtained her answer in the public library, where the record existed independently of either of them and could in principle be checked by any reader. Uncle Charlie draws her into the enclosed twilight of the tavern and replaces archive with voice, verification with charisma. He cannot rebut the evidence; he tries to surround it with atmosphere and restore the authority once granted him by her idealization.

This is where the charming visitor assumes the darker role Nick Haeffner calls the Hitchcockian “heroic Satan”: a Mephistophelean figure who presents corruption as forbidden wisdom and submission as initiation (Haeffner, “Heroic Satans” 67). Yet Mephistopheles has arrived late. The initiate already knows too much, and the shadow can no longer pass itself off as substance, much less an existential ideal.

The disturbing force of Uncle Charlie’s speech lies partly in the fact that it answers a question Charlie herself posed before his arrival: what is wrong with ordinary life? Her earliest revolt was directed against repetition, materialism, and an existence she experienced as spiritually unchosen. “We eat and sleep and that’s about all.” Her father talks about money; she wants to talk about souls (SD). She longs for an authentic existence capable of lifting her mind above the nothingness of day-to-day practical life.

Uncle Charlie initially seemed to embody that miracle. He seemed to possess movement, style, money, secrecy, and the freedom of a sovereign man who can afford the luxury of singularity. In Lacanian terms, he occupied the place of an ideal ego: the completed image of the self Charlie wanted to become. The tavern scene dramatizes the reversible dynamic of fantasy formation in its full horror: the monstrosity suddenly revealed inside the double she had chosen to emulate. He too despises the ordinary, but he has converted Camusian revolt against the absurd “void” of the banal quotidian into hatred of ordinary people (Camus, Sisyphus 4).

“You’re just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town,” he tells her; she sleeps an “ordinary sleep” filled with “peaceful, stupid dreams” (SD). The repetition is calculated. He attacks Charlie through the category she has spent the film trying to escape. His temptation is intimate: if you do not want to be ordinary, become contemptuous; if you want lucidity, learn that other people are swine.

Here Uncle Charlie assumes his full allegorical function as Charlie’s shadow self. He is not Charlie’s dark double because she secretly possesses his murders or sadism. He is the shadow cast by an elitist possibility within her own desire for distinction—the possibility that the revolt against inauthenticity might harden into disdain for those deemed insufficiently exceptional. The twins now separate along two forms of singularity: while the serial killer is driven by a deep existential urge to transform people into an anonymous series of disposable “swine” so that he can feel extraordinary, Charlie must become extraordinary without making anybody else nothing.

His assertion that the world is hell may recall Sartre’s “Hell is—other people” in Huis clos, but Uncle Charlie reverses the existential stakes (Sartre, Huis clos 93). Sartre’s formula concerns the danger of surrendering oneself to the petrifying gaze of another consciousness. Uncle Charlie turns otherness itself into the crime. Having proclaimed other people as hell by nature, he decides that whatever he does to them merely acknowledges reality. He converts an existential problem of freedom into a zoology of blame: the others are swine by sheer virtue of their otherness.

Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment exposes the same maneuver. The ressentiment-ridden consciousness defines itself by saying no to what lies outside it (Nietzsche, Genealogy 472, I §10). This is, of course, a contradiction that recalls the splitting of the Sadean l’Unique between a compulsive reliance on the other in order to assert the self and the negation of that very other. Uncle Charlie cannot establish his exceptionality in affirmative terms—through creation, relation, or responsibility; he needs Santa Rosa, the family that admires him, the women he exploits, and above all the niece whose recognition once reflected his grandeur back to him. His supposed independence is crowded with other people. What he calls knowledge is therefore a form of bad faith: the world must be filthy so that the hand doing the dirty work can imagine itself merely lucid in refusing to engage that world constructively.

This philosophy of nihilistic exclusion becomes predatory method when Uncle Charlie unleashes it on wealthy widows. Names, histories, affections, and vulnerabilities disappear beneath a grotesque inventory of bodies—fat, wheezing, animal, available for slaughter (SD). “Are they human?” is not an inquiry. It is a verbal deportation from the human category, performed before the violence it is meant to excuse.

Misogyny does decisive conceptual labor because the reduction of the world of others to categories turns the prey into interchangeable beings in an endless series of sacrificial victims. Scapegoats. The widow must first be approached as an individual—courted, charmed, studied—because predation requires access to the singular person. Once access has been secured, individuality becomes inconvenient surplus. And the doctrine is delivered to a woman. Charlie soon realizes that if “woman” can become the interchangeable member of a class—a disposable element in an endless series of “swine”—then even the beloved niece cannot remain permanently exempt simply because she is beloved, young, or related to the predator.

Maurice Blanchot identifies this quantitative impulse in Sade: negation seeks realization “at the level of large numbers,” until beings become interchangeable units within an indefinitely repeated scenario of destruction (Blanchot, “Sade” 709, 722–23). Uncle Charlie’s fantasy of slaughter “by the thousands” exceeds the empirical dimensions of his known crimes. That excess is the point. His nihilistic imagination wants serial murder to become metaphysics—private predation translated into an unlimited sovereignty of negation.

Because the film appeared in 1943, such language necessarily opens onto a wartime horizon of mass othering, scapegoating, and organized annihilation. The resonance should not be collapsed into equivalence: Uncle Charlie is not a miniature totalitarian state, and his victims are not allegorical proxies for the victims of the Holocaust. What the comparison exposes at its most preliminary level is a shared operation indispensable to dehumanizing violence: before destruction can be imagined without limit, the other must be redescribed as something to which the protections of humanity no longer apply.

Charlie’s reply is immediate and philosophically decisive: “But they’re alive! They’re human beings!” (SD). Against his metaphysics of quantity, she restores the living person; against his taxonomy of animals, she insists upon humanity. The apparent simplicity of the sentence is its force. Uncle Charlie invites her to prove sophistication by ceasing to care. Charlie begins to discover that affirming authenticity and lucidity over against ordinariness need not terminate in contempt. Her awakening can pass through knowledge of human ugliness—the somber shadows of violence lurking behind ordinary domesticity—without accepting his conclusion that humanity is ultimately worthless.

The tavern scene therefore marks a decisive mutation in the predator–prey dialectic, with major consequences for Charlie’s movement toward a higher form of self-consciousness. At first Uncle Charlie occupied the dominant position almost effortlessly: Charlie projected sovereignty onto him, and her fascination fed his exceptional self-image. The ring altered that relation by carrying the metonymic trace of a murdered woman—the engraved name; the newspaper made concealment readable; the library placed knowledge outside the family bond. By the time uncle and niece face one another in the tavern, Charlie has already begun to move from identification with the predator toward solidarity with his prey.

Claire Lejeune’s model of predation clarifies the reversal: the apparent prey ceases to exist merely for the predator and begins to discover the possibility of being for herself—the paradoxical moment when “the mouse has caught the cat” (“Du Point de vue du tiers” 105–06). That is very nearly what Hitchcock stages here. Charlie has tracked him, forced the reaction, reconstructed what he destroyed, and brought him to the point where he must explain himself. The predator remains physically dangerous, but epistemically the positions have begun to invert. His lecture is an attempt to reverse that reversal and reclaim the performative authority he is losing.

The struggle is dialectical in a deeper sense than an opposition between innocence and evil. Uncle Charlie’s hatred of the average echoes Charlie’s early hatred of banality; his craving for distinction grotesquely mirrors her desire not to become “an average girl”; his suspicion of appearances answers her determination to discover what lies behind the fronts of houses. Charlie’s shadow self speaks in distorted versions of her own language. Her task is to preserve the legitimate desire inside her rebellion—depth, singularity, a self-chosen existence—while refusing contempt, dehumanization, and predation.

The knowledge is pharmakonic precisely because the poison enters Charlie’s consciousness as she delves ever deeper into the diagnosis of an abysmally destructive mind, yet never becomes sovereign there. It destroys her faith in the exceptional man who seemed to answer her hunger for a larger life, but in destroying that fantasy it releases the hunger from him. She no longer needs Uncle Charlie to prove that depth exists; she is acquiring depth by dissecting and confronting him. Nor can this pharmakonic tempering—this evolution of consciousness through exposure to the shadow—culminate in Charlie becoming the stronger predator. The inversion has ethical meaning only if consciousness can pass through the struggle and cease to define freedom as domination.

With this performative inversion within the predatory bond, the pedagogical scene has reversed. Uncle Charlie’s every assertion becomes material for Charlie’s diagnosis: hatred of ordinariness, fantasy of exemption, sexual contempt, grievance inflated into universal law. He tells her to look behind the fronts of houses and inadvertently describes the split between his own polished persona and the obscene law beneath it. The master has become the symptom; the prey has begun to capture the predator. Beneath the metaphysical thunder, however, runs a more material circuit—money, appetite, mobility, and female bodies selected for use. Soon his creed will contract into a single affirmation of impulsive acting-out in the here and now: “Today’s the thing. That’s my philosophy. Today” (SD). Charlie will discover that “today” has an account book.