Alfred Hitchcock, get off my chest already

In her lecture to coincide with the BFI’s screening of Marnie, Laura Mulvey urges the audience not to giggle at Hitchcock’s use of rear-projection. The special effect, in which actors’ performances are viewed against pre-filmed backgrounds, was mocked by critics when the Tippi Hedren-Sean Connery psychodrama was first released. Mulvey argues that this reaction underestimates Hitchcock, failing to recognise his self-conscious use of an archaic technique to expose the vulnerability of the cinematic illusion. The metatext reflects the artifice of the Hitchcock Blonde - and gender itself, a radical reading of Hitchcock might add.

Does such a radical reading overestimate Hitchcock? I am not sure there is a difference between overestimation and active reading: if you think it’s possible to overestimate a filmmaker, you must consider yourself an entirely passive viewer. Mulvey, it turns out, overestimates the chunk of her audience who chuckle at every sign Marnie wasn’t made last week, as if the past is nothing but a cute, stupid kid and the present tense a patronising uncle.

So a film has at least as many possible interpretations as it has viewers, sure, but Marnie’s genius is to draw two conflicting interpretations from the teeming mass of audience and consistently sustain both. The film lays the groundwork for a conservative reading: the manipulative seduction of the kleptomaniac fraudster Marnie Edgar by the print tycoon and amateur-psychoanalyst Mark Rutland confirms the patriarchal myth that Man must demystify wild and unstable Woman in order to subdue and possess her. But Marnie plants too many subversive traps for this interpretation to dominate. Rutland does not seduce Marnie with charm, good looks and money; he discovers her stealing and blackmails her into marrying him. Marnie mocks his attempts to play psychoanalyst – “You Freud, me Jane?” – and she is right to do so, as Rutland does not wait patiently until Marnie is ‘well’ enough to want to have sex with him; he rapes her.

The rape scene is astounding. Mark and Marnie are on their honeymoon. Marnie has so far refused to sleep with Mark and insisted on separate bedrooms. One night they are arguing, and he follows her into her room and pulls her nightgown off. Cue the obligatory leg-shot, and a close-up of Marnie’s humiliated face (she is forced to stand naked, the audience is forced to imagine her naked torso). He says sorry, they kiss, and the camera adopts Mark’s perspective as Marnie’s stunned, blank face is seen sinking into a pillow. The next morning she tries and fails to drown herself.

For good reasons, the classic feminist line is to insist on the unambiguous nature of rape: it either is, or it isn’t, and terms like ‘date rape’ only trivialize the crime. The Marnie rape, even without the spousal clause, would never hold up in court. But the film conveys definitively that the sex is non-consensual. Furthermore, it situates the rape within a broader culture of inequality, deftly manipulating the viewer’s feelings of identification and guilt (Hitchcock = Haneke’s more fun older brother?). The chuckle-happy BFI audience snickered along with sneery Sean Connery as it watched him assert his conjugal rights by shooting caustic one-liners at Marnie. It is difficult now to separate that scene from the palpable hush that swept through the cinema as the audience watched Rutland’s verbal aggression turn physical. That sound of laughter abruptly muted is the distillation of all Marnie’s contradictions. The film makes the radical claim that heterosexual norms are underpinned by a culture of violence against women, but the norms it is critiquing are also those of Hollywood, and the film’s mode of critique is manipulative and ambiguous, maintaining as it does the option of reading Marnie as a patriarchal fantasy, Mark Rutland as a romantic hero.

During the post-lecture Q&A Mulvey was asked about the social context of Hitchcock’s work and specifically the significance of women’s entry into the workplace. “That’s just a backdrop,” Mulvey shot back like a bullet, maintaining that the isolated psychodrama was what interested Hitchcock and is what should interest us. But Laura!

The culmination of Rutland’s psychological detective work is the discovery that Marnie’s problems – her addiction to theft, her distaste for sex – originate in a forgotten episode from her childhood, when she kills an aggressive client of her prostitute mother in self-defence. It is significant that the audience discovers this fact at the same time as Marnie. Our sympathies are with Marnie and her mother, not Rutland, who learns the facts of the case at an earlier stage. For all his books on psychological deviance and the frigid female mind, Rutland just has to make a few calls to learn the ‘truth’ about Marnie’s condition. In the end, it is money and status and connections that allow Rutland to figure Marnie out. And, crucially, it is not an ahistorical oedipal psycho-crisis that lies at the root of Marnie’s problems, but her single mother’s lack of money and status. Marnie’s theft makes sense as a doomed strategy of economic independence: the apparent Marnie plays secretary while the real Marnie makes a parodic bid to opt out of the system that crushed her mother. And similarly, the apparent film plays out a conventional romantic narrative, while the 'real film' attempts to subvert these conventions from within, perhaps content that the result will be unsettling, inconsistent and eerie.

I left the cinema utterly convinced by Mulvey’s arguments for Marnie’s consistent self-parody but frustrated by her reluctance to observe that this self-parody amounts to a simultaneous annihilation and preservation of hetero-normative gender politics, mainstream cinematic conventions and the entire ethos of the capitalist patriarchy (yeah!). I have a relaxed and easy approach to the risk of overestimating Hitchcock, because I am not willing to underestimate the thrill my rad-feminist reading of Marnie gave me in the dark cinema. And even if Hitch and I disagree about politics, we both reserve the utmost respect for the act of sitting in the cinema and being thrilled - of this I am almost sure.