Psalm 23: Race, WWII, & Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”
A recitation of Ps. 23 in “Lifeboat” configures spirituality and race at the tail end of World War II
In Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “Lifeboat,” Joe Spencer (Canada Lee) was the only survivor on the raft who knew all the words to Psalm 23. His voice corrects the fumbling recitation, and he steps into the scene at the words, “he restores my soul.” I hear Black/African American poetics about the soul in this scene, like W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which Du Bois explains “double consciousness” to describe the psychic effects of the White gaze. Joe recites the whole poem during a life-raft liturgy for burial at sea. The racist portrayal of Joe drew criticism while a handful of African American organizations praised Lee’s performance. In “The Baffling Cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock,” (Atlantic) it is said that Hitchcock subjected his female leads to “intense degrees of psychosexual torment” — which caused me to note a gendered visual trope at the end of the Psalm 23 scene: the beatific face of a white female character pondering Psalm 23’s poetics.
Filmed in Los Angeles and Florida, “Lifeboat” is about Nazi German, British, and American survivors on a life raft with only one Black character — the highly troped cast produces tight American poetics about spirituality and race at the tail end of World War II. [Thx, atl and mss]
Film poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” (1944) that portrays Joe Spencer’s recitation of Psalm 23.
The moment at the end of Joe’s recitation, when the camera pans to the white woman’s face — This moment is a good example of the psychological-spiritual-political tangle I am getting at in this series on Psalm 23. What troubles me is the earnest benefit the white female character seems to draw from hearing the only Black character recite a poem about needing protection and healing.
The poetics of Relation between Joe and the rapturous white female listener is recognizable to me as a pervasive cultural form. If I may shift attention from the White gaze to White sensory reception: Her listening feels to me like it is a sensory consumption. A psycho-spiritual consumption of someone else’s poetics of vulnerability — a psycho-spiritual consumption that is characteristic of White evangelical poetics of Scripture. When evangelicals say of a passage of Scripture, “how does this apply to me?” They are bending poetics towards their psyche before allowing poetics to be Glissant’s “thoughts of the Other.” I can tell I am still caught up in this tangle, to some extent — the tangle of American female psychology — I am not yet satisfied with my writing or analysis about it.
