Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig’s line flatters Hitchcock on the surface, but its real bite is aimed at the audience’s complacency. “Makes it very clear” sounds like praise for clean craft, yet Puig is really pointing to a kind of pedagogical manipulation: Hitchcock doesn’t merely show; he trains viewers to feel the gears shifting between an “objective” view that pretends to be neutral and a “subjective” view that quietly recruits our nerves. By analogizing camera positions to third- and first-person narrators, Puig is smuggling cinema into literature’s moral accounting system. A narrator is never just a conduit; it’s a set of permissions about what we’re allowed to know, when we’re allowed to know it, and how guilty we should feel for wanting to.

The subtext is that Hitchcock’s “clarity” is a weapon. The objective camera produces authority: the sense that the world onscreen is simply “there,” unarguable. The subjective camera, by contrast, manufactures intimacy and complicity. It’s not just seeing through a character’s eyes; it’s being placed inside a desire, a fear, a suspicion. Hitchcock’s genius is toggling those modes to make spectators oscillate between judge and accomplice, often within the same sequence.

Context matters: Puig is a novelist obsessed with borrowed forms and mass media grammar, writing in a Latin American tradition that’s suspicious of “neutral” viewpoints and fascinated by popular culture’s power. He’s arguing that cinematic technique isn’t decoration; it’s narration with consequences. The camera, like the voice in a novel, is ideology wearing a tuxedo.