Why Don’t You Love Me? is dedicated to what is certainly the most outstanding of Hitchcock’s obsessions: overwhelming, phallic mothers. As if the after-effects of childhood traumas were being transformed into media experiences, the soundtrack keeps repeating the voice of Claude Rains (in Notorious) calling to his mother for help, as well as the refrain from the children’s song in Marnie, “Mother, mother, I am ill!”. In the images, on the other hand, we see sick children who cannot separate themselves from their omnipotent mothers. They attempt to assert themselves in the face of maternal criticism and, when all other ways of escape seem to fail them, turn to fantasies of matricide. Possessed, the film montage pivots on the obsession that Hitchcock did not want to let go of because it lies at the core of every image in the imagination: the face of the mother, uncanny because it blurs the borderline between love and hate, between the security of knowing that one is protected and the fear of being swallowed completely.

Elisabeth Bronfen, I am haunted, but I can’t see by what, Album by Matthias Müller, NBK Berlin 2004