Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and Leconte's Man on a Train: Denying and Befriending the Shadow

This paper offers an analysis of two films made 50 years apart. Both films deal primarily with the shadow archetype and with a pair of male characters who are at once opposites and doubles of one another and whose lives collide or converge in fateful ways. The relationship between persona and shadow archetypes is explored in both films, as are the negative and positive contents in the shadow. Hitchcock pairs a politically ambitious tennis player with a charming but psychopathic killer in order to examine how denying the shadow through repression and projection leads to dangerous and self-destructive shadow eruptions. Hitchcock's main character never fully acknowledges or integrates his shadow and never accepts his complicity in the murder commited by his double. French director Patrice Leconte pairs two unlikely characters, a retired teacher and a world-weary gangster. As their friendship deepens, each character comes to understand how his very different life represents the unlived life of the other man. Acknowledging their differences, learning from one another, exchanging gifts and roles and maintaining the tension of opposites, both men enrich their lives and integrate their shadows. The dynamics of the shadow archetype—the success or failure of characters to bring to consciousness, acknowledge, and integrate their darker sides—is the focus of this essay and the central concern of these two psychologically complex, entertaining films.