Must We Kill the Thing We Love?

David Banash:
William Rothman is one of the great close readers of film.... In his new book, Must We Kill the Thing We Love?: Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rothman again performs virtuoso acts of close viewing.... An important contribution to Hitchcock scholarship.

Gilberto Perez, Sarah Lawrence College:
William Rothman, who wrote the remarkable Hitchcock: The Murdeous Gaze, now takes a revisionary Emersonian view and seeks to enlist the devilish master of suspense on the side of the angels.

Stanley Cavell, Harvard University:
Nobody knows the films of Alfred Hitchcock better than William Rothman. The idea of linking these wonderful and dense films with an Emersonian vision is inspired. Rothman's training in philosophy combines lucidly with his lifelong devotion to film in producing a work of originality and authority.

Murray Pomerance, Author of The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect:
In this glittering homage to Emerson, Cavell, and the Master of Suspense, one of our most learned scholars of film opens new pathways to understanding Hitchcock's work as penetrating, provocative, labyrinthine, and exquisitely mortal.

Leland Poague, Iowa State University:
Rothman entered the field of film study as a maverick, as a Harvard philosopher, at a time when most film classes were taught in literature and language departments, though he has been vindicated in the last decade by a proliferation of philosophical approaches to cinema. While Rothman draws his examples from all across the Hitchcock canon, his work remains resolutely and productively philosophical in that he grapples with the history of Hitchcock's thinking about film, his thinking with and through film. In tracking Hitchcock's ruminations on love, murder, and mortality Rothman both deepens and illuminates our understanding of Hitchcock's continued and uncanny appeal.

Richard Allen, author of Hitchcock's Romantic Irony and co-editor of The Hitchcock Annual:
In his seminal book, The Murderous Gaze, Rothman emerged as a central voice in the study of Hitchcock with his probing and fine-grained analysis of the filmmaker's style and deep interpretations of his work. This new project builds on the critical premises of his earlier work but modifies its predominantly ironic view of Hitchcock. Here Rothman argues with critical verve that Hitchcock's films also contain a redemptive vision of the perfectibility of human nature.