MARNIE ISSUES

I never considered Marnie to be one of Hitchcock’s best films, that is, until I went out with a kleptomaniac...

Cue Bernard Herman score.

"In a sense, all film is entering into someone else's dreams. Maybe we can even share the same dreams, exchange the same experiences." - David Lynch

There’s something almost hallucinogenic about the Hitchcock films of the 1960s, as though they are increasingly untethered from reality and inhabiting a universe that more closely resembles fever dreams sprung from Hitchcock’s visual imagination than anything approximating a remotely recognisable reality.

Such is the beauty of cinema authored by such pathological directors as Hitchcock, similar to Bergman, Buñuel, or Lynch. You feel as if you're living in the projection rooms of their minds, made freely available to the public at large at any screening venue where their films are shown.

Of course, there had been some dabbling by Hitchcock with surrealism and expressionism in an earlier film, Spellbound (1945), with dream sequences inspired by Dali, but by the 1960s, there seemed to be a Hitchcock cinematic universe which lived and breathed by its own rules and, once capturing an audience for a few hours in a darkened auditorium, would have been as if the outside world dissolved entirely.

Hitchcock, like Walt Disney by this stage in his career, had become a globally recognised brand name synonymous with the stories he told the world, and both men, in their own way, seemed to explore something deep about the human psyche through their preferred genres: for Walt, fairy tales; for Hitch, suspense and horror. Even though, on the surface, their work can at times seem almost superficial or overly stylistic in its execution, both artists were reaching towards something psychologically profound.

Certainly, the genius of both artists was their ability to create mainstream entertainment that touched upon profound themes of the human experience, regardless of whether critics understood this or not.

It was Vertigo (1958) that perhaps most famously signalled an overt exploration of human psychology in one of Hitchcock’s films, transcending its ludicrous Penrose Stairs plot to become something almost poetic, surreal, and tragically human. The film achieves a kind of flawed perfection in realising what Hitchcock had always hoped cinema could be, both as an art form and as entertainment. The influence of expressionism had been significant on Hitchcock throughout his career, and his lack of inhibition when entering the shadow realms of stories in search of deeper truths about human desire and obsession is what makes his later films so rewarding to revisit, beyond their basic video shelf genre classifications.

Marnie is a strange one though. Both melodramatic and borderline operatic at times in its use of emotional colour to tell its story through character, there's also an almost tendency toward hysteria at times, though perfectly matched with the febrile brain of its troubled protagonist.

As for Sean Connery, cast as the complex character of business entrepreneur Mark (a composite of Henry Fonda's zoologist in Sturges's The Lady Eve meets James Bond meets Sigmund Freud), it sometimes seems as if this is a James Bond movie where, instead of carrying out a mission on behalf of MI5, Bond here is determined only to focus on the sole issue of a woman, a woman with a myriad of psychological complications. There is also a touch of Professor Higgins in Mark as he attempts to experiment on Marnie with his amateur attempt at psychoanalysis, as if she is his Eliza Doolittle but with psychotrauma instead of dialect coaching. However, like Eliza, Marnie (like her mother before her) is keen to break free of her social status measured by financial status. Her obvious attractiveness is her social mobility in this instance, and she takes full advantage of it, all the while being a frigid person, never once being held hostage, it seems, by her own attraction or passion to a man, for there is none inside of her, it seems. The trauma has buried those feelings long, long ago.

Mark's possession of Marnie as a human project for his own desire or curiosity (we're never quite sure) remains a mystery throughout the film. But in his presumption to help her with her past demons, he could also be seen as using her vulnerability as a way to play an almost psychosexual game of dominant and submissive. The more the true Marnie becomes revealed to Mark, like a Russian doll, the more she has nowhere to hide from him. She becomes expunged of her endless reincarnations like a female Flying Dutchman by the strange love of this man who seems to enjoy playing her unofficial psychiatrist.

The fact that Marnie uses many identities to reinvent herself constantly and embroil herself in one con after another means that we're not entirely sure if the real Marnie (the little girl troubled by childhood events) even fully exists any more,though perhaps in an early scene returning to her mother's house in Baltimore, where she attempts to rest her weary head on her mother's knee like a small child, we get some idea of the truth of her arrested development, i.e. who she really is.

In this sense, Mark's 'ownership' of Marnie is problematic in its illusionary grasping at something that doesn't seem to fully exist, similar in way to Hitchcock and his films, flickering shadows on the wall that titillate and provoke but almost seem perpetually unreal in their stylistic artifice.

Something like dreams themselves.

My first impression of Marnie wasn't much to write a blog post about. It certainly made less of an impression than films such as Psycho, North by Northwest, and The Birds.

But later on, after dating a woman who I had discovered to be a kleptomaniac (which had been a type of neurological diversion to stem the tide of some form of PTSD), I came to appreciate the story and film of Marnie as something not so far-fetched as I had first thought, the melodrama and operatic excesses closer to what I myself had come to experience through observing my partner at the time. Though I bore no resemblance in any respect to Sean Connery's Mark, I did relate to a sense of trying to understand someone who seemed to possess an entire backstory previously unrevealed to me, like a hidden basement room filled with secret memories.

When Mark suggests to Marnie that she might read various books on psychoanalysis to help her better understand her own mind and impulses, one could also suggest that he too needs a diagnosis for his own unusual pathology, the desire to control someone and fix them without their consent, a project of his own making that fate or coincidence throws his way but which was never asked of him to embark upon. Perhaps the idea that, in order to love Marnie, he needs to solve Marnie is one that makes sense. Before I knew the nature of my own 'Marnie', I didn't need to love her anymore than I already did, but once that secret room of the past was revealed in part to me, I felt I had no choice but to enter and see if I too could play a form of detective or psychiatrist. It probably didn't help.

In any case, I didn't consciously think of this as my role in her life, where Mark spies an opportunity to exercise this part of his interest in conjunction with a woman whom he obviously finds attractive (we assume) but who also seems to fascinate him.

Michele Miso, in her excellent essay "Mark's Marnie" in The Hitchcock Reader, addresses the transactional nature of key aspects of the story of Marnie and how it relates to the class parallels and differences shared between the characters.

"Mark's first wife was an heiress; the second, a thief. The first gave him the property that the second one steals. Enclosed in the glass cage of the Rutland office, Mark is trapped within what Joan Landes calls "the inherent tension in the bourgeois love match between the demands of the bean and the considerations of property. Mark's marriage of convenience, to save the family business, is an act of prostitution not unlike Marnie's mother's prostitution to save her child from poverty and state intervention. The difference, of course, is that Mark's property identifies with him civil law, while the illegitimate professions of mother rand daughter place them at its farthest remove."

The almost lifeless atmosphere of scenes in Marnie (a heavy reliance on studio sets, etc.) makes the entire film seem wholly unreal, as if we're experiencing cinema by way of psychoanalysis, as if the audience are sitting on the psychiatrist's couch and being interrogated by Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Mark's exposition on various theories from psychiatry is a little heavy-handed at times but, given that Mark is a man with possibly too much time on his hands, it makes sense for him to have a hobby.

Marnie, however, with all her myriad issues, is a full-time career.

One might even like to see a sequel showing how things turned out for the married couple.

Hopefully better than my version at least.

Cue Bernard Herman score.