1 Fugue
Marnie Edgar is on the run. Our first glimpse finds her already in motion, striding confidently away from the camera on an empty railway platform, modernity apotheosised, her body fitted snugly into tweeds, her styled hair black as coal. Beneath her arm is a fat purse, a labial pouch in Provocation Yellow. We glide behind (the purse gripping our gaze), she stops to wait, and the scene fades. Soon later,1 two suitcases are open on a nondescript hotel bed, the silks of a soiled identity tossed into one, a crisp new masquerade folded into the other. A sheaf of ID cards hides behind the mirror of her compact. In the bathroom, a head plunged into the sink ⊠that black industrial identity rinsed down the drain ⊠and arising into camera view, brilliantly doubled in the mirror, the platinum hair of â
Our girl, eyes bright with triumph, complexion alabastrine. She has escaped, whatever the trap: in this case the bloated, piggy face of Strutt (Martin Gabel), grunting everlasting possession â âRobbed!â â insatiable jealousy, resentment, malicious hunger for revenge.
In the explosion of that proud, beautiful face inside the wet ring of sparkling hair, we already loved her.
In dreams awake
Alfred Hitchcock proclaimed the chase âthe final expression of the motion picture mediumâ, adding that its tempo and complexity were âan accurate reflection of the intensity of the relations between the charactersâ (pp. 125, 129). Arriving in Philadelphia,2Marnie (âTippiâ Hedren) neatly deposits her old suitcase into a 30th St Station locker, the key into a heating grate on the floor.3 At Rutland & Co., under the pseudonym âMary Taylorâ, she applies earnestly for a job. The young boss, Mark (Sean Connery), is watching with interest; he gives the nod. Training with ever diligent Susan Clabon (Mariette Hartley4), then calmly scouting the premises of the office manager Ward (S. John Launer5) â in order that Marnie would stand out in it, specific instruction was given that Wardâs office should be painted a pale colour (Robertson to Boyle) â she makes plans to fleece her new employer. A habitual thief (and, as she presents herself here, widow), and trailing a chain of previous robberies and sloughed identities wherever she goes, Marnie springs directly from Winston Grahamâs 1971 novel, which had been agented to Hitchcockâs assistant Peggy Robertson (Hall, Robertson: p. 231). Hitchcockâs practice was to treat popular fiction as Marnie treats employment, extract the principal treasure without obligation â to the authorâs style, overall theme, or plot.6 If ever he had a female alter ego (as implied by Maxwell Coplanâs strange photograph in François Truffautâs important interview book [p. 321]) Marnie is her epitome.
In the washroom late one afternoon, she secretes herself in a stall until all the other employees have gone home (on Hitchcockâs obsession about toilets, see Spoto: p. 415 and note). Then, âborrowingâ the safe combination from its hiding place inside Susanâs desk (forgetful Ward must consult it several times a day), she nabs the company funds and tiptoes off, past the cleaner (Edith Evanson), who would hear Marnieâs shoe drop if she werenât deaf. Flight is the theme: from her recent past; from her complicating job at Rutlandâs; from the fact of her thievery (she proclaims herself an innocent); and then, upon her beloved stallion Forio, from every binding divot of turf which might position her in a fully drawn present. Only in the finale (which I will address at the finale of this book) do we learn how all of Marnieâs flights compose a single whirlwind escape â from a long-lost yesterday. In film, every moment is a flight from the moments before.
Unreal
Stalwart, sleek, and gleamy black, Forio is the one constant and true repository of love in Marnieâs life. She would fain visit her mother in Baltimore, but first a digression to Garrodâs farm for a ride on Forio.7 When Marnie is upon him a different kind of flight is involved, something more akin to the fugue states discussed in psychoanalytic theory, where locomotion is linked to neurosis. We have two senses of Marnieâs fall from reality: her tight interconnection with, and cherishing of, Forio, thus divorce from the walkaday world through postural elevation and dependence upon the organic motion of another being (sex can, yet need not, be implied); and her race into the future at a speed no human body can achieve on its own. Because of the way Hitchcock shows her, she is separated, withdrawn into a private world split psychologically and cinematically from everyday space and time. Effects were not needed to cover Hedren: she could ride well â the shot of her trotting toward the camera on Forio, and discovering the stoically angry figure of Mark, is made without a stand-in, in one fluid take ending on a close-up of âTippiâ in the saddle. Yet most of the horseback shots were done in studio against a rear-projected background, thus depositing a strange dislocation and oneiricism in which Marnie floats, even flies, with the green world dropping away as in another dimension. More daydream than reality, these shots are invested with considerable affect and bear âtraces of both the occasion which engendered [them] and of some past memoryâ (Freud: pp. 45, 48). In the close-ups, a beatific remove is etched on her features as she bathes in an eery light.
Dislocation and oneiricism
While the argument could be made (by anyone unfamiliar with the technicalities of rear-projection filming) that Hitchcock is an unprofessional failure here â even his assistant thought âit didnât look goodâ (Hall, Robertson: p. 284) â we should recall his attraction to process work and cinematographer Robert Burksâs origins in special effects. Hitchcock knew how to get what he wanted, and how to vary the rear-projection effect. Later in the film, for instance, we see rear projections that are entirely imperceptible as such (for example, at the racetrack). Hitchcock intended Marnieâs riding sequences to appear precisely as they do: intermediates between unaffected reality and artful construction. They permitted him to lure his audience in two contradictory directions at once, away from and toward total identification with Marnie, who wants frantically to be only where she is. On Forio she can flee from a mother (Louise Latham), who, over-steeped in upright Christian values, apparently loathes her own daughter. Forio is the vehicle of Marnieâs soul, uplifting and redeeming her.
A similarly stunning separation or fugue occurs in the tiny Baltimore street where Bernice Edgar lives â âjust like the north of Englandâ (Hitchcock to Hunter). Marnie is making another of her seemingly routine, if infrequent, visits early in the film, bearing a fur stole (spoils of the Strutt conquest but attributed to a beneficent, entirely fictional âMr Pembertonâ, for whom she âworksâ). Much later, she is dragged back there when Mark, having discovered that Marnieâs mother is not âdeadâ, and working out the moral obligations of his sincere love to the last turn, insists on solving the dark puzzle that has locked the young woman into herself. Both scenes include long and medium shots of the street, with children singing the strange little skipping rhyme âMother, Mother, I am ill/Call for the doctor over the hillâ.8 Hitchcock had wanted here to replicate a street running off Londonâs East India Dock Road: âYou turn the corner and suddenly, thereâs a ship! Itâs in the street. You know, itâs actually at the end of the roadâ (Albert Whitlock quoted in Krohn, The Birds: p. 41). His designer Robert Boyle worked with scenic artist Harold Michelson to make a huge backdrop with a ship painted on it, and Burks shot the scene to simulate first a sunny, then a rainy, day. Technically speaking, the ârealityâ is distorted:
He wanted this looming image. And you know what it was. We tried to dissuade him and thatâs where we made a mistake. He dug his heels in and he was determined to get this damned image, which, of course, was no longer possible, because really all we would see in 1.859 would be the hull. What would that mean? It would be just a black ⊠totally unreadable. Harold had to keep drawing it so that the superstructure came in, so that you could see the funnel ⊠and now itâs a ship and now itâs also too damn small. (Whitlock quoted in Krohn, The Birds: p. 41)
Stage 21 at Universal set for filming the finale at Berniceâs house (11 February 1964)
Many viewers detect a difference in realisation between this background and the brick row-houses, so that, expecting in movies only radical extremes of ârealismâ or âartificeâ, they judge Hitchcockâs vision sloppy, amateurish, and out of key.10 But the vision is perfectly achieved, since some intermediate state of mind between being at rest in her dream world of freedom and finding herself trapped in the socially determined and morally strict confines of Berniceâs home now afflicts, disturbs, displaces, even torments Marnie. Further, the performance rhythm and diegetic continuity would be interrupted, ruinously exaggerated, were Hedren to fully enact the emotional panic and distanciation Marnie feels. Her feelings are projected outward by way of the lighting and scenery, the qualitative distinctions that find their way to the eye. Marnie always feels one thing and does another, and the technique of doubling the screen actually mounts her doubled being as a visual concern.
Marky Mark
From Mark Rutland, too, Marnie is in flight. As a person, as a male, and as a capitalist, he antagonises her. The film is a map and history of this agon. Superficially an icon of the managerial class, scion of the Rutland publishing fortune â the 1960s antedated the digital revolution â Mark is a âmarkerâ of the staple transactional, economic materiĂ©l of Western culture. âThe oral tradition [of the Greeks] emphasized memory and training,â writes Harold Adams Innis, but âwe have no history of conversation or of the oral tradition except as they are revealed darkly through the written or the printed wordâ (p. 9). By the sixteenth century, âan enormous increase in production and variety of booksâ and, by 1800, âthe invention of the paper machine and the introduction of the mechanical press involved a revolution in the extension of communication facilitiesâ (p. 27). Money, legal texts, literature, advertising: by 1950 all of these were handled through publication.11Marnie has placed herself in conflict with dominant peers of the economic system, having undertaken as a hobby (now become quasi-professional) what sociologists call âcraft thieveryâ:
Criminal craftsmen have always had to adopt some way of relating to the police to minimize their effectiveness. The simplest and most obvious way of relating is avoidance, and, as we have seen, many of the techniques of craft crime serve to prevent people, including the police, from knowing a crime is taking place and, when they have f...