Hitchcock and the Forms of Violence David Greven (bio) McKittrick, Casey. Hitchcock's Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. vii + 198 pp. $115.00 cloth; $39.95 paper. Humbert, David. Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017. xxv + 174 pp. $24.95 paper. Demonstrating that we have far from exhausted the possibilities of book-length Hitchcock scholarship, two well-informed, well-written, exciting, occasionally vexing studies boldly reframe the central concerns of Hitchcock's oeuvre. Casey McKittrick's Hitchcock's Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread focuses on a cluster of related themes: Hitchcock's relationship to his own body and especially to his weight, which fluctuated significantly over the years; the relevance of the director's films as well as biography to the emergent field of fat studies; and the ways in which Hitchcock's experience as a fat man allowed him an unusual empathy for and identification with the female characters in his films. In his Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis, David Humbert, stating from the outset that he wishes to break from conventional Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic readings, applies the theories of the French literary critic and philosopher René Girard to several Hitchcock films. Girard's theories of mimetic desire—desire oriented by imitation of and [End Page 142] competition with others—and the scapegoat prove especially significant to Humbert's project. When Hitchcock first came to the States in 1937 to pursue a Hollywood picture deal, he enjoyed a soon-notorious six-course meal at New York City's "21" Club: "steak, followed by ice cream, repeated two more times, and washed down with brandies and three pots of English tea" (McKittrick, 23). The image of Hitchcock as a brazenly gluttonous fat man, one that Hitchcock himself cultivated in his early days to curry favor with the press and the public fascinated by his gustatory zeal, was established in the United States from this incident forward. When Hitchcock returned a year later, he was much more circumspect, emphasizing his sensible meal of broiled lamb steaks and fruit. Nevertheless, the caricature would stick with Hitchcock throughout his life and career. Courted (finally) by the legendary producer David O. Selznick, Hitchcock moved to the U.S. in 1939 and worked in Hollywood for three decades. Even though the director went from being obese to a relatively sensible weight of 189 pounds (at his thinnest) in the 1940s, the initial impressions of him and his forever fluctuating weight—and his mordant self-deprecation about his size—all assured that Hitchcock's fatness would be a paramount feature of his fame. McKittrick pays careful attention to Hitchcock's self-representation as a fat man and to the ways in which Hitchcock's fatness became and remained a fixture of public commentary about him. McKittrick argues that Hitchcock's vulnerability as a public figure with bodily imperfections rife for observation and opinion gave him insights into the difficulties women faced by being the visible sex, the object of the male (or, more accurately put, the collective) sexualizing gaze. McKittrick establishes that he wishes to merge the emergent field of fat studies with feminist and queer theory perspectives. While he namechecks those in the field of fat studies early on, he does not consistently ground his analyses in the specifics of fat studies-theory. And while he speaks from feminist and queer theory perspectives informed by psychoanalytic theory (exemplified by Tania [End Page 143] Modleski, Gayle Rubin, and Lee Edelman) as well as from an articulated subject position as a gay man, he also does not stick rigidly—as Humbert does in his Girardian study—to one theoretical approach even as the book overall hews closely to "woke" discourses of queer, feminist, and fat studies and their interpretations of gender and sexual oppression. His study demonstrates a new kind of hybrid critical model in which several resistant modes of theoretical analysis converge and meld. One would also imagine that this book might be firmly entrenched in the cultural studies mode, analyzing Hitchcock's films, food imagery...