Hitchcock leaves keen encounter of wits, falls something into slower method

Frenzy is by all accounts a deeply weird movie, but there's something about it that I love. It's my favorite Hitchcock, although I would need two hands to count the number of times I've lost points with cinephiles for saying so. However, Tania Modleski's Women Who Knew Too Much mentions something that brings into focus why I like the film so much.

First of all, it's important to understand Frenzy as Hitch's last film, and to understand what this does (and doesn't) mean:

Some critics have looked at the increasing use of graphic violence in Hitchcock films as evidence of a rather sick mind. For example, in his biography of Hitchcock, Donald Spoto has documented Hitchcock's obsession with filming a rape/murder and has condemned the director as something of a dirty old man. The way the biographer tells it, Hitchock's career can be seen as one long frustrating bout with cinematic impotenct until he managed finally to achieve full orgasmic satisfaction with Frenzy: "Unable to realize a rape in No Bail for the Judge he hinted at it in Psycho, metaphorized it in The Birds, and, against all advice, included it in Marnie. Now at last—encouraged by the new freedom in the movies—his imagination of this sorded crime could be more fully shown in all its horror."

It's a cute metaphor (although judging from his book Spoto should check the beam in his own eye before slinging around "sick man"), and it's certainly possible to understand Hitchcock as a director obsessed with sex, but I've always understood him to be far more concerned with voyeurism, cinema, and other kinds of watching. In fact, there's something to be gotten from saying that Hitchcock was only interested in sex insofar as it relates to his primary obsession, which seems to be what Anthony Lane is suggesting here (read at least the first sentence):

Sex becomes a sort of animated suspension; lovers in Hitchcock circle warily around each other, more like predators than like dancers, and even when their lips meet, the camera is likely to continue the waltz... My favorite passage in Hitchcock begins with Kelly springing the catch on her dinky overnight bag in Rear Window. It's no bigger than a briefcase, but out of it froths a Botticellian spray of lingerie. Before leaving to put it on, she shows the contents to Stewart, and says, "Preview of coming attractions." Movie love is so hot that it sounds like a movie.

Frenzy is a kind of culmination, not as Hitchcock's most explicit film but as his most voyeuristic. Unlike Psycho and Vertigo, Frenzy has very few subjective point-of-view shots. Scenes are not shot to evoke how a participant would see them, but to depict how a spectator would. The famous Vertigo shot is stylized rather than realistic because, for the person experiencing vertigo, perception is disturbed. The hysterical jumpiness of the shower scene reflects how fear and homicidal excitement distort a person's vision. In the scene between Barry Foster and Barbara Leigh-Hunt, which is shot very literally, none of the misperceptions of participation are there. Hitchcock, at the end of his career, finally became comfortable declaring himself to be, more than anything else, someone who liked to watch.