Hotels on the Border: Cinematic Situations of Transgression and Transcendence

Three important 20th-century American films prominently feature a hotel as the site for morally ambiguous and sexually charged events depicted in the plot: Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), and Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink (1991). While all three films have a multiplicity of elements that present how hotel spaces open horizons displaying human behaviors both normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, secret and public, sane and insane, the paper presents an extended argument for seeing these particular cinematic efforts as being built around the same theme: that transgression (of a violent, misogynous nature) is the path to transcendence.