Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train: Its multiple personality theme is mostly missed by Alfred Hitchcock’s movie

In the novel, Charles Bruno kills the wife of Guy Haines, and then Guy reciprocates by killing Bruno’s father. In the movie, Bruno Anthony kills the wife of Guy Haines, but Guy does not reciprocate, so Bruno tries to pin the murder on Guy.

Two other glaring differences between the novel and movie are, first, that the movie renames Charles Bruno to Bruno Anthony, and second, that the movie omits the novel’s explicit theme that creative people have multiple personality.

The movie does have a visual motif of “the double” (literary metaphor for multiple personality)—for example, when Hitchcock does his trademark walk-on, he is carrying a double bass—but that is as far as the movie goes.

Names of Main Characters

Throughout the novel, the two main characters are almost always referred to as Guy and Bruno; that is, Guy Haines’s first name and Charles Bruno’s last name. This is very peculiar and never explained. You would expect them both to be referred to either by their first names or last names, but not one by his first name and the other by his last name.

This peculiar naming of the two main characters cannot be accidental or inadvertent. What does the author mean by it? Well, when you have the first name of one person and the last name of another person, and you put them together, it adds up to one whole person. In other words, the two main characters are the alternate personalities of one person, who has multiple personality.

Explicit Theme of Multiple Personality

“It may interest you to know that Guy Haines […is…] a dual personality” (1, p. 134).

“And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved” (1, p. 180).

[Guy thinks] “It was only a part of himself he had to cope with, not his whole self, not Bruno, or his work. He had merely to crush the other part of himself, and live in the self he was now. But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked and cowed him” (1, pp. 189-190).

“[Guy] felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God when he created [Guy is an architect], and the other who could murder…the man who had glanced into the mirror just last night and had seen for one instant the murderer, like a secret brother” (1, pp. 203-204).

[Guy says,] “Do you know the greatest wisdom in the world, Bruno?…That everything has its opposite close beside it” (1, p. 208).

[Bruno says to Guy’s second wife,] “I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything…People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person” (1, p. 251).

Who is Guy? Guy is an architect (not a tennis player as in the movie). An architect symbolizes creative people (such as novelists). So the novel is saying that creative people have multiple personality.

1. Patricia Highsmith. Strangers on a Train [1950]. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.