In Marnie, the Psyche Laid Most Bare Is That of Alfred Hitchcock

I’m not partial to readings of films reliant on extratextual context. It’s lazy, small-brained, usually indicative of binary thinking. But there are a couple of examples that seem unavoidable. One, Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Centered around a 42-year-old comedy writer in New York City dating a 17-year-old high school prep student, the premise is too eerily similar to Allen’s own contemporaneous vocation and sexual proclivities. Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie is another such case. A disturbed reflection of the auteur’s own perversity, it’s a plea to cinephiles to question Hitchcock’s construction of his own mythos.

Marnie focuses on Margaret “Marnie” Edgar (Tippi Hedren), a troubled thief on the run from Sidney Strutt (Martin Gabel). She yearns for love from her disabled mother Bernice (Louise Latham), whom she provides a living for through her thefts, while also suffering from recurring nightmares and synesthesia in relation to seeing the color red.

Months later, Marnie applies for a job at Mark Rutland’s (Sean Connery) publishing company in Philadelphia. An acquaintance of Strutt, he recognizes her and begins to pursue her romantically. When Marnie inevitably steals from him, he tracks her down, and it is this scene that sets the stage for the rest of the film’s horrific events.

Mark wants to tame Marnie’s kleptomaniac inclinations, to help her through them. But the catch is that he does so by essentially forcing her into marriage. Mark gets an inkling of Marnie’s repulsion toward sex when, as he confronts her, she says, “I didn’t say men weren’t interested in me. I said I wasn’t interested in them.” But Mark ignores her for the sake of his own machinations. There are many Marks out there, prioritizing their own pleasure over another’s safety. Hitchcock is one of them.

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Over the course of the film, Hedren vacillated between feeling secure with and imperiled by Hitchcock. She had a certain degree of appreciation for him, commenting that Marnie was “ahead of its time” because “people didn’t talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put that all in a film was shocking.”

But it was also a production accompanied by repeated sexual hostility, by violent, forced kisses in the backs of cars and offensive demands that she make herself available sexually at all times—“however and whenever and wherever [Hitchcock] wanted.” In a film premised upon Mark’s dominance over a sexually repulsed Marnie, this is obviously disquieting.

“I’m fighting a powerful impulse to beat the hell out of you right now, Marnie,” Mark says while kidnapping Marnie. His statement follows a previous sentiment he expresses to Marnie, that women are the “predators” to men’s “prey,” his description of heterosexual romance as rooted in women’s overpowering “animal lust.”

Of course, this all seems ironic, because it is. Mark holds all the power here over Marnie, her kleptomania a justification and conduit for Mark’s weaponization of his own dormant animalistic desires. Hitchcock’s own approach toward directing—rooted in technical meticulousness—mirrors this, almost as if the events of Marnie necessitated this treatment of his lead star, or perhaps justified it.

As Mark’s resolve to “contain” her grows stronger, Marnie voices a sobering realization in the scene: “You don’t love me; I’m just something you caught. You think I’m some kind of animal you’ve trapped.”

Marnie’s story builds alongside Mark’s uncontrollable lust for Marnie, culminating in her rape. He initially accepts her rejections, listening to her wry retorts. (“Oh, men, you say ‘no thanks’ to one and bingo, you’re a candidate for the funny farm.”) One night, though, he bursts into her room, and as Marnie pleads with him that she simply just wants to go to bed, he proceeds to undress her in one fell swoop. For a moment, he mumbles a brief apology and takes her into an embrace, removing his shawl and placing it around her. But following this, the camera follows Marnie’s subjectivity as Mark’s embrace is transformed by an erotic fervor. He leans her backward into the bed as a dead-eyed passivity takes over Marnie. As he rapes her, the camera turns toward the window, water in sight.

The next day, Marnie attempts to envelop herself within it. The trauma of this encounter has wrecked her so completely that she’s endeavored to kill herself. Mark, however, “saves” her, and their marriage continues. Likely continual rape coalesces with Marnie’s continued experience of flashes of red (the cause: a repressed moment of violence and sexual assault from her childhood). Paternal caretaker and ardent lover in one, Mark therapizes Marnie through it.

Mark’s oscillation between roles mimics Hitchcock’s own approach to working with his actors, particularly his female ones. Protector, overseer and tormenter all in one; Hedren is far from the only actress to be on the receiving end of Hitchcock’s aggressions.

On the set of his 1927 silent film The Lodger, young British actress June Tripp (according to the actress’s 1960 memoir) was subjected to “carry[ing] an iron tray of breakfast dishes up a long flight of stairs, but by the time Hitch was satisfied with the expression of fear on my face… I must have made the trek 20 times. […] I felt a strange, sickening pain in the region of my appendix scar, but forbore to complain or ask for a rest because delicate actresses are a bore and a nuisance.” Following this, Tripp never worked again. The brutal work on set had caused a bodily rupture necessitating that she have a post-appendectomy operation, which she was lucky to withstand.

Predictably, the alternating fear, care and psychosexual aggression Hitchcock put his actresses through was a real-life accompaniment to his onscreen interest in the torment and allure of blondes. It’s useful extratextual knowledge, something reflecting a throughline in his career and his working thematic interests.

With Marnie, Hitchcock constructs a film that isn’t as much a thriller interested in the banality and horrors of gendered violence as much as it is a psychological drama, one that makes use of the contemporaneous public interest in psychoanalysis—particularly indicated through the picture’s interest in Marnie’s childhood, family life and anxieties. Marnie herself is an attentively etched, haunting character, her background complicated and refusing neatness.

The resonance of her character, though, doesn’t entirely lie in Hitchcock’s characteristically meticulous storyboarding but through the spontaneous glimpses of perturbed melancholy that flicker through Hedren’s performance—something Hitchcock didn’t quite have control of. Marnie is a character whose identity is at once carefully constructed but also refuses understanding, one that’s animated and frenzied in fear but inanimate and passive in desire. In the presence of Mark, she vacillates between torment and longing, feelings of safety and danger, a yearning to be taken care of and an ache to be left alone. The unanswered questions within her interiority are still a feat watching the movie today, where contemporary films usually imbue their story with psychology to provide tidy answers.

Tragically, Marnie’s feelings toward Mark appear to mirror Hedren’s own feelings toward Hitchcock. The filmmaker’s hyper-rational approach to his craft has long been adulated. In countless biographies and interviews, Hitchcock’s artistry has been defined by formal precision—a specific style of constructing images, of producing sound, of positioning in blocking and so on. Popular discourse around his films are often relegated to this, mirroring Hitchcock’s own commentary. But this often obfuscates the larger thematic throughline within his filmography: sex and its uses, abuses and perversions as a widespread social modus operandi, one that informs both antisocial behavior and acts of heroism; desire and its sublimation, desire and its consummation.

Peering into Hitchcock’s own personal life, the auteur had been married since 1926 to writer and editor Alma Reveille. But their relationship appeared to be much more a partnership, his feelings toward her more maternal than anything, with his filmmaking serving as a channel through which to appease his own psychosexual inclinations. Hence, the endless torture and psychosexual acts toward his actresses: from Tripp to Hedren, with Madeleine Carroll, Kim Novak, Mary Clare and more in between.

It may sound a bit facile, but Marnie is twisted because Hitchcock was. His adaptation of Marnie’s source material essentially turns Marnie’s rape into the consummation of Mark’s love for her—a splitting of the difference between Mark’s zealous lust and Marnie making steps to overcome her sexual trauma. Winston Graham’s 1961 novel, in comparison, in adopting Marnie’s subjectivity through first-person narration, renders the rape more alienating than anything else. Mark does believe he loves her, but Marnie’s distress is what’s emphasized.

The final sequence of Hitchcock’s film consists of Marnie attempting to steal from Mark once again, and him overlooking her as he takes her back home to speak with her mother. Marnie blubbers to him and her mother about her trauma, Marnie and her mother reach a moment of understanding, and Marnie realizes that despite her long-standing fear of him, she needs Mark. Solemnly, the two walk out of her mother’s home together, where Marnie softly tells Mark, “I don’t want to go to jail; I’d rather stay with you.”

The two are rendered comparable—telling of Marnie’s psyche—though the score, discordantly, soars. The scene is suffused with a resigned horror, not because Hitchcock desires that, but because it lurks underneath the sheen of his quasi-tender romance. For all of Hitchcock’s rational specificity, he couldn’t account for this.

Troublingly, Hitchcock’s climax (I don’t love the pun here) departs from the novel’s ending, which sees Marnie reach the point of suicide after her trauma and anxieties catch up with her. Hitchcock’s preoccupation with centralizing romance in Marnie likely speaks to the studio’s whims and marketing strategy but also indicates something much more sinister: the idea that psychological neuroses can be assuaged by a captor who re-inflicts a similar kind of pain. Worse, that assault is entitled to a kind of impunity if under the guise of care.

Marnie is a picture that’s unsettling on multiple axes: textually, metatextually and extratextually; together, these layers weave Hitchcock’s most frightful work—one that constructs glaring holes within Hitchcock’s self-mythology. His greatest works (Rear Window, Psycho, Vertigo and beyond) are the greatest because of this bestial elements of his character; they inform the carnal, brutish aspects of his films, and most troublingly so, are what make them so magnetic. Marnie lifts the veil off this and then some. It’s the most glaring example of a text that Hitchcock couldn’t quite control.

Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.