The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

complex, textured film in which technique and thematic preoccupations combine without commercial compromise. Robin Wood, the doyen of Hitchcock critics, said, “If you don’t like Marnie, you don’t really like Hitchcock . . . if you don’t love Marnie, you don’t really love cinema.”

Adapted from Winston Graham’s novel of the same name, Marnie is about a brilliant but damaged woman who thieves her way around the country, robbing huge sums from her duped employers before leaving town and relocating under a new identity. In Philadelphia, a mutual attraction develops between Marnie and her new boss, the dashing but arrogant Mark Rutland. What Marnie doesn’t know is that Mark has an inkling of her criminal past. When she steals from him, he quickly tracks her down and blackmails her into marrying him. They take a honeymoon on a cruise ship, where their bond develops, but Mark becomes infuriated by Marnie’s complete aversion to sex—although it’s hard to imagine many women rushing into bed with a man who has coerced them into marriage. In their cabin one night, Mark is overcome with lust and frustration, and pulls Marnie’s nightdress down. Seemingly ashamed of his actions, he apologizes immediately and wraps his dressing gown around her. Marnie is now frozen, catatonic, as Hitchcock women often are in the wake of a traumatic experience. Mark begins to kiss her, and then he rapes her. The next morning, Marnie attempts to drown herself in a swimming pool but is saved by Mark at the last minute. From here on in, Mark, by turns caring and obnoxious, makes it his objective to cure Marnie of her kleptomania and her sexual phobias, which he seemingly does in a melodramatic final scene in which Marnie locates the childhood trauma that has disordered her mind.

Even by Hitchcock’s standards, Marnie is an ambiguous, polarizing film. When working on his first draft, Evan Hunter questioned the rape scene, arguing that it was dramatically unnecessary and bound to ruin any sympathy the audience had for Mark. Hitchcock was undeterred: “Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!” When Hunter submitted a version of the script with the rape omitted, he was let go soon after. His replacement, Jay Presson Allen, later told Hunter that she thought the rape was Hitchcock’s “reason for making the movie.” It presaged events more than a decade later when Ernest Lehman objected to Hitchcock’s plan to begin the script of The Short Night—his final, unfinished film—with a rape scene. Lehman was ultimately replaced by David Freeman, who had no such qualms. Likewise, Allen had no worries about how Hitchcock’s female audience would respond to Marnie. “I’m very fond of Evan,” she remarked in 1999, “but I think he was psychologically a little naïve. There’s a vast audience of women out there who fantasize the idea of rape.” In another forum, she told an interviewer that writing the scene “didn’t bother me at all . . . I just thought she [Marnie] was kind of a pain in the ass and I didn’t blame him [Mark].” That, coming from the film’s scriptwriter, might be the kind of sentiment that the writer Bidisha detected when, in an article in the Guardian in 2010, she cited Mark’s treatment of Marnie as a crystalline example of Hitchcock’s “full-on misogyny, rampant woman-blaming and outright abuser apologism.”

Other critics argue that Marnie is actually a conscious attack on the patriarchy, the most forceful example of Hitchcock’s compassionate respect for female suffering at the hands of traditional masculinity, an identity from which he had always felt alienated. Mark Rutland, argues the academic William Rothman, “has a singular bond with women . . . a capacity to identify with women, no less than to desire them, that he has in common with Hitchcock himself.” Moreover, Rothman questions “whose will, if anyone’s, is being imposed on whom” during the “so-called rape.” Marnie’s total inertia, her complete lack of any emotion after Mark rips off her nightdress, “gives him grounds for believing that after his sincere apology she now trusts him, and gives us grounds for believing, as he does, that he is making love to her, not raping her.” That opinion seems hard to square with what we know of the film, and what we know of rape. Marnie is, to use Rothman’s words, “entranced, turned inward,” and totally unresponsive when Mark takes hold of her; that she’s not screaming and scratching his eyes out does not indicate she’s consenting.

Similar debate has been had—though less frequently, and less passionately—about the scene in Blackmail in which Alice stabs Crewe as he forces himself on her. It seems to have been filmed unambiguously as an attempted rape, but certain critics have expressed doubts. That Hitchcock’s films cause such debate about the simple facts of what is shown to us on-screen could be attributed to their director’s commitment to ambiguity, his aversion to a black-and-white world of easy answers. It also reflects the gap between attitudes of our own time and those of Hitchcock’s filmmaking prime. In the 1980s, Robin Wood posited that audiences of that decade might struggle to fully comprehend Hitchcock’s classic films of the 1930s, because assumptions about gender and sex had shifted so much. Something similar could now be said of Hitchcock’s films of the sixties. One need only read the Truffaut interviews for evidence of how the critical atmosphere has changed in the last sixty years. At several junctures, Truffaut analyzes Hitchcock’s female stars in a notably sexualized way. Of Teresa Wright’s performance in Shadow of a Doubt, he says her “portrait of a young American girl was outstanding . . . she had a lovely face, a nice shape, and her way of walking was particularly graceful.” He’s even more effusive about Kim Novak in Vertigo, whose “carnal qualities” and “animal-like sensuality” were perfectly suited to the role. “That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere.”

This does not mean that the