It is no secret that Marnie is not an easy film; in fact, it might qualify for the most controversial and disturbing work in the Hitchcock canon. Through its complex set of themes and raw intensity, watching the film makes for a challenging and multi-layered experience.
However, through its expression of internal conflict and irrepressible fear, in capturing the horror and imprisonment of living with trauma, Marnie succeeds in creating a visual language for the unspeakable. As the often-debated film turns sixty this year, it’s time to ask what it is about Marnie’s story that both captivates and provokes and why, despite its problematic nature, it is worthy of our continued attention.
The Art of Artifice
One aspect of Marnie that incites argument is what can be referred to as its dated and artificial aesthetic. If we look back over Hitchcock’s filmography, however, it is obvious that he has always favored emotion over realism. Above all else, he was an artist interested in making audiences feel.
Through use of rear-projection, matte shots and artwork, Hitchcock and his team combine the real and the imagined, creating a unique alchemy that contains notes of dreaminess, nightmares and the uncanny. In doing so, we are connected to the world beyond the “real” and “everyday.” In Marnie’s case, a connection to the past and a memory she has not yet unlocked.
The ship that sits intimidatingly and immovably at the end of the street of Marnie’s family home in Baltimore is symbolic not only of a connective fabric to the past but of a psychological blockage. Filling up the space with imposition, it represents a literal obstacle tied to events in both the past and the future. That this ship remains in position even after Marnie uncovers the source of her trauma tells us all we need to know about notions of a happy conclusion.
The lack of naturalism in the film is used not only to convey entrapment and anxiety, but to communicate openness and freedom. When Marnie rides her horse, Forio, the rear projection evokes a sense of ease and self-expression on her behalf. Hitchcock is conveying Marnie’s emotion at this precise moment. As her hair blows in the wind amidst a backdrop of sun, greenery, and vitality, we share in her brief experience of inner bliss.
The artifice of Marnie is evidence of a director not past his sell-by date, but rather of one who has clear intentions behind making such choices. The world we see is strange and alienating because this is how Marnie experiences it. It is also reflective of the multiple identities she occupies and her rigorously protective boundaries. Marnie’s environment is an extension of herself and she and her surroundings intersect and fuse with one another in a unique visual dialogue of cinematic sublimity.
A Screen Soaked in Color
The famous red suffusion, creating the effect of a screen soaked in alarm and terror, represents the most striking visual device present in Marnie. From the gladiolas which Marnie asks the young interloper Jessie (Kimberly Beck) to dispose of-as though she were asking her inner child to remove trauma out of sight- to the unsettled dream she experiences upon returning home, these instances powerfully demonstrate her need for soothing and acceptance.
While these suffusions may create a distancing effect from the film, they also elicit an emotional response that takes us deeper into Marnie’s psyche, serving many complex purposes. Firstly, Hitchcock gives us privileged access to how the color red has a yet-to-be-discovered impact on Marnie.
Punctuated and intensified by Bernard Herrmann’s piercing score which creates an intimacy with the title character, we are also aware that this red links to a repressed memory. With empathy and intrigue, we are taken to a private place with Marnie, to moments connected to a secret Hitchcock will withhold until the final scene.
Beyond the nerve-inducing suffusions, the color yellow also takes on meaning, conveying a complicated and delicate subtext. From the vaginal-like purse containing stolen money and a collection of identities shut tightly under her arm, to the locker key where she disposes of her most recent persona and the suit which love rival Lil (Diane Baker) wears when Marnie first sees her, are all yellow.
Through these instances, Hitchcock repeats the use of a specific color to denote threat, both towards and from the protagonist. At the racetrack, “Lemon” Pudding is her choice of horse and during her honeymoon with Mark (Sean Connery), their cabin walls bear the same striking color. For Marnie then, there is no escape. Danger is everywhere.
Ahead of his most predatory scene before raping her, Mark is shown head-to-toe in yellow/gold pajamas and a robe. As he has done throughout the film, the director builds on the color motif established thus far, and Mark becomes the personification of terror.
Of all the suffusions, one episode stands out amongst the rest. It occurs over a fleeting few seconds but Marnie’s reaction is at its most animated and disturbed. While at work, she accidentally drops a spot of red ink on her snow-white blouse. This moment of complete and authentic horror prompts a trinity of inhales from Marnie, from the camera, and from the viewer.
Unusually, the words of the highly problematic Mark contain insight into the underlying pain of his future wife, as he asks a colleague to check on her: “I think she’s hurt, find out.” This incident links thematically to the couple’s forthcoming visit to the racetrack, where Marnie’s eye catches the jersey of a horse jockey, which is covered in large red circles. Is this indicative of the small ink spot on Marnie’s blouse growing and multiplying? Or does this represent her attempting to join the dots together, the dots that will eventually lead her to the blood-soaked memory that has been haunting her?
“Safe” Escape
Often cited as one of the most Hitchcockian moments in all of Hitchcock, the safe scene encapsulates many of the director’s preoccupations. Meticulously composed, it has craft, rhythm, and builds to a crescendo of relief after a carefully plotted graph of unbearable tension. In an echo of his fascination with the festishitic, Hitchcock also draws our attention to Marnie’s gloves and shoes, objects of specific sexual interest associated with the body, a site of particular significance throughout the film.
We begin in the bathroom — always an important locale for Hitchcock —as we see Marnie nestled amongst the shadows of the toilet stalls. When she makes her way into the ghostly quiet of a vacated workplace, she is discreet, methodical, and watchful.
Hitchcock makes the magnificent decision to split his screen in two without actually splitting it. He uses the dividing wall of the office as a marker for two simultaneous events — Marnie “cleaning” out the safe and a worker cleaning the floor.
Our focus is brought back to the fetishistic object, and we watch, fixated as Marnie quietly places her shoes into her pockets to avoid discovery. The suspense is as agonizing as it is glorious. In this scene, we are placed in that most familiar and compromising of Hitchcockian spaces, both willing her to succeed and harboring a secret curiosity about what will transpire if she is caught. Fortunately, Marnie will escape this scene free from capture, but escaping for Marnie never lasts too long…
A Feminist Film?
Despite its undeniably disturbing and misogynist content, female energy circulates about Marnie with a quiet power. In fact, Hitchcock puts the final reveal of “the whole story” into the hands of a woman — Marnie’s mother, Bernice Edgar (Louise Latham). The fractured bond between Marnie and her mother (see also The 9 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies To Celebrate Mother’s Day), has been damaged by past experiences, meaning they are never able to let down the walls so solidly and carefully erected over time.
Elsewhere, supporting and minor female characters are also richly drawn and integral to the story. From Lil, whose excited sideways glances at Marnie and the question of: “who’s the dish?” signals fascination to the young Marnie doppelganger, Jessie (Kimberly Beck), it’s impossible to ignore that women in Marnie are of great importance.
Even a female secretary (Carmen Phillips), who we see only briefly, delivers an impactful line of revenge on her misogynistic employer Strutt’s (Robert Gabel) far too detailed description of Marnie by revealing to the police: “Oh Mr Strutt, don’t you remember-she didn’t have any references at all.”
To arrive at a fully balanced view of how far Marnie might be a feminist film, an assessment of its male figures is vital. External to Mark, the men of Marnie are shown to be careless (Strutt), forgetful (Ward), and entitled (Mark’s father, we hear, has never stepped foot into Rutland & Co). As for Mark himself, he is, as Hitchcock described him: “dark, brooding, a hunter.” Not only is he guilty of victimizing women but of shaming them too, and any notions of him as a hero are erased by the series of inexcusable acts he commits.
By the film’s conclusion, Mark might have saved Marnie from jail, but he also succeeds in trapping her in a marriage built on an exploitation of class and gender power. As Mark’s cousin Bob describes him, he is a man who is “deranged.” In fact, on their fatal honeymoon, Mark even categorizes himself as: “some other sexual blackmailer.” This glimmer of self-awareness we see from him, coupled with the fact that he makes no attempt to correct his behavior, casts him as an irredeemable Hitchcock male.
Endings
In the last interaction between mother and daughter, one that is, despite the reveal, still laden with heavy and unresolved emotion, Mark asserts that he will “bring Marnie back.” This indicates an arrogant belief that he is capable of “curing” Marnie while also signaling a view that he occupies her as a possession.
As the film draws to a close, we hear children singing in the street outside the Edgar house. The words “mother, mother, I feel ill” are also sung during Marnie’s first visit home near the beginning of the film. Hearing them for the second time, it is as though they symbolize Marnie’s voice of inner lament for her own fate.
From the opening shot of a mysterious female figure in a train station, which stirs an unexplainable curiosity, Marnie transfixes; Marnie is transcendental. This late entry in Hitchcock’s career is about a search for belonging, about contending against forces of the past and becoming an object of male possession. It is the story of a woman who seeks to undermine a world governed by various streams of male power and who, as a result, finds herself sentenced to a life with a man who has violated, coerced, and raped her.
Marnie touches upon something that is depressingly bleak but also profoundly human. It is a film about realizing that while we might be able to recover and unlock the past, this comes with no guarantee that a brighter future is waiting. Rather, by the end of the film, all Marnie can hope for is a more honest understanding of herself.
