PeterK

First thing I did was march into the record store and buy On the Beach and Marnie.

I've ordered the re-record and my fingers are crossed since this score just rules in my book. I'll have to get back to you after I've played it a few times.

Well I'm back from my first listen to MARNIE. And...I'm kind of mixed on it.

Some things are just dead on, especially the strings. But, there are lots of problems too. It's not complete. And the one cue I wanted them to record the most because it wasn't on the boot LP or CD was the short scherzo version of the Marnie theme that comes in around the wedding/porch sequence. It wasn't there and they lost major points from me for that.

But there's more--tempos are strange, one bar will be on, then the next too fast, the next too slow, somethings which should have bite are toned down, other things are emphasized when they shouldn't be, there are strange quarter beat rests where there shouldn't be, held notes where there shouldn't be, notes which sound off to me, there are things I've never heard before, etc. Plus, as there are some cues which have music in them that is not in the film, I suspect the recording was done off a manuscript of the score made up before the recording and the music editing, which may account for some of the alternate renderings.

"It's also true that both Hitchcock and Herrmann make the rape and domination of this woman by a control freak into a kind of romance---and yet that interaction does free Marnie from her Obsessive-Compulsive disorder."

Seriously? The Mark Rutledge character (Connery) hardly seemed like any of that to me. I think he was an absolute fool to fall in love with Marnie, but he wasn't a villain. He saved her from prison and spent very big money to protect her.

What Marnie seems to be about, in this context, is how men have a tendency to place women into roles that they may not fit into. Marnie herself has problems, to be sure, but Mark's solutions (which involve rape) do not present themselves as being much better.

Does Mark cure her? Certainly not. He does uncover aspects about her past, to be sure, but whether he cures her or not is another story entirely. To ascribe all of Marnie's behavior quirks to one incident (even if it does involve Bruce Dern in a sailor suit... a truly frightening thought) is silly. It was only one trauma, and Marnie probably has many more to work through.

The film's ending is somewhat ambiguous about the positivity of this; Marnie now chooses to go home with a man who has brutalized and raped her. If anything, Mark may be creating a new and more dangerous Marnie than he is bringing her closer to society at large.

In Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock, Wood acknowledges that Mark is aware of what he is doing--that's why he says to Marnie that some other sexual blackmailer might have caught her that was not as understanding as he is. The use of other means he knows he is one himself.

I agree that Mark doesn't look like such a bad guy--he's heroic, great looking (hell he's Connery for Christ sakes!), runs a company, has women like Lil after him, etc.

But even these positive aspects can become a prison for Marnie. Another author (whose name I've forgotten) wrote an essay that appears in some Hitchcock collection which says that for Marnie to go from asexual thief, as someone who won't sleep with men but steals from them, to the wife at Wycwyn, is for her to go from a free Marxist rebel to a stifled bourgeois at her expense.

Evan Hunter walked off his script duties for Marnie because he objected to what he considered a rape. He said at the least the character would lose sympathy with the audience if the scene were to go this way. I think Hitchcock pressed for the rape because it was his fantasy to sleep with Hedren, the unconscious joke of course is that Hitchcock is represented in the film in the guise of Mr. Strutt ("I knew she was too good to be true"), who stuck with an aging unapealling wife craves the young blonde ("Oh Mr. Strutt, don't you remember, she didn't have any references at all"). Hitchcock is there in every unappealing man in the film actually.

I called it an obsessive compulsive disorder because she's obsessed with the color red and it triggers panic attacks and because she feels compelled to steal. It may not be a true case of OCD however. I just used the term as a shorthand.

In any case, Swash is right, bringing a woman out of a serious mental illness is not accomplished by forcing sex on her--at best, this may break down her phobia by showing her she can have sex and not die, even if she tries to kill herself afterwards. But it is more likely to force her to withdraw even deeper--which is depicted on screen in fact as Marnie just zombie-like and blank-eyed is violated in a petrified state without her offering up any passion, interest, or resistance.

Swash is also correct in noting that discovering one crucial incident will not automatically cure one--it may unlock a mystery and reveal the client's story which overcomes a block or illusion and is the first step towards healing, but it won't clear things up immediately. It's more Hollywood than Freud that the film ends as it does.

I'd like to look at Marnie as the story of a man who shows a messed up woman that love and sex and a normal life are possible and I did look at the film like that for sometime in my teens and twenties, but I feel that this romantic fantasy of the strong man solving everything doesn't work on a literal level. That doesn't alter the fact that the film really gets into emotional terrain that no other Hitchcock film does, that watching the film feels like therapy as a writer once said of it. There are so many things in Marnie that are so well accomplished that it feels off to criticize it. Yet, even in the midst of the cinematic soul-searching, Hitchcock still makes these people go through his stylistic machinations like puppets. And so he imposes his sensibilities onto a reality that doesn't work that way. He wants his cake and eat it too--that the frustrated guy who takes what he wants is still the prince and knight in shining armor. And part of the job of getting you to see it Hitch's way is the lush love music by Herrmann which tells you this is a romance at every turn when it isn't referring to Marnie's mental state. So, yes, I guess I'm serious about what I said.

Mark is a victim both of Marnie's criminality and of his own desires. He tries to drag her kicking and screaming into a normal life, entirely at his expense, but he doesn't understand much about mental illness.

Regarding the rape: In those days, a wife had wifely duties. All she had to say was, "No thanks, I won't marry you. I'd rather face the music for the crime I did in fact commit." When she opted for marriage, to escape justice, she bought the package. In spite of her illness, her level of competence to decide these matters seemed clear enough to me.

Don't forget, today's campus feminists regard all male-female conjugations as rape, with no exceptions whatsoever. In its edgy, college campus strain, it's a diseased, malignant ideology, ever alert for the opportunity to slander or curse men.

I don't mean to suggest Hitchcock was a rapist at heart, merely that he was a terribly sad and twisted man, as his later movies in particular seem to show. Among his most famous, VERTIGO, is one of the strangest romances ever devised; so, in its own particular way, is THE BIRDS.

(Will THIS flush the long-lost Tom Scofield out? We wrestled over Hitchcock before, he declaimed Donald Spoto as a fraud. C'mon out and play, Thomas!)

For me the movie had two weakness. One was the rather shallow
pop psychology used to explain Marnie’s sexual hang up. Like
it or not, the movie posits that one incident in her past caused
her to be male phobic. Handsome Sean makes mommy tell her
the truth, Marnie remembers the evil incident which is a cathartic
event, and she decides to stay with Sean,
who, regardless of the rape and the need to control, is portrayed
overall as a rather patient hero or savior. I
assume she will be a happy, “dutiful” wife from that point on.
It would be nice if mental problems were so shallow and so easily cured,
but after working several years as a counselor, I find quick fixes rarely
fix anything. Still, this was a movie dealing with the psychological
insights of its time period and its director.

My second problem was with Tippi Hedren. IMHO, she was
a horrible actress who delivered shallow performances in Marnie
and The Birds. She has the classy blonde looks Hitch loved, but
her acting skills were weak compared to Grace Kelly. For me,
she just couldn’t carry the movie. The other actors, however, were fine.

(Thank goodness my personal feminism can’t be called into question
as I graduated from college a LONG time ago. )

These are just my own impressions of the movie; however, I feel that
all the above arguments are commendable.
I’ve enjoyed this thread and felt that I’ve learned a lot from the varied
insights into this movie. You’ve all made me ponder issues I hadn’t
considered when viewing this movie, and I hope to see more discussions
of movies and music like this.

"There is a trauma.

"Dream work reveals what appears to be the true memory of what happened long ago.

"But the revelation is a false one.

"A screen memory (not as in MOVIE screen but as in something behind which one retreats to change one's clothes) is a FALSE memory of the trauma. It hides the REAL memory which the traumatized victim cannot face. I did indeed explain all this to an audience, in highly dramatic scenes Hitch never used in his movie. In the picture that was finally made from Jay Presson Allen's screenplay, for which she received sole credit, Hitch discarded the complicated screen memory concept altogether, opting instead for a simpler bargain-basement explanation of Marnie's compulsive thievery and frigidity."

What the REAL memory was, I guess we'll never know. It would certainly be interesting to read a copy of Hunter's screenplay!

Still, for all its pop psychologizing, I think the movie did have its affecting, even psychologically truthful moments, as when even after all the revelations have come out, Marnie's mother still can't accept Marnie's love ("Marnie, honey, you're achin' my leg").