it's all a big nothing

I find myself comparing Chase's blackout to the scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy in which a serial killer enters the apartment of his next victim. The door shuts and the camera starts winding slowly down a staircase as the audience waits for her scream. The camera reaches the ground floor. No scream. It backs out the front door. No scream. The sounds of the old Covent Garden (back when it was still a vegetable market) come up. No scream. Then Hitchcock cuts away. But Hitchcock isn't saying, "I'm not going to tell you whether the woman was killed." He's saying, "I don't need to tell you whether the woman was killed, because you already know. Of course she got killed. He's a serial killer, for Pete's sake!" Frenzy was Hitchcock's second-to-last film, and his last great one, and that tracking shot is the distillation of a half-century's experience crafting suspenseful narratives. *

Probably the most credible explanation I've seen to this point.